


Lay of the Yellow Dragon - Chasing Tail

by Blackmarch



Category: RWBY
Genre: Action, Actual Story, F/F, Fire, Funny, Futanari, It burns, Oral Sex, Other, Romance, Self-Insert, Sex, Shower Sex, We All Burn, i burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-31
Updated: 2020-01-19
Packaged: 2020-04-05 06:58:40
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, No Archive Warnings Apply, Underage
Chapters: 12
Words: 50,697
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19043482
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Blackmarch/pseuds/Blackmarch
Summary: In which Yang is an annoying older sister, ideal student, and fucks like a champion. You know. Just Remnant things.





	1. Chapter 1

Breakfast at the Xiao Long-Rose household. Eight in the morning. Bacon and eggs. A bright-eyed father. A barely conscious Ruby. A hungover and definitely not conscious Uncle sleeping on the table, forcing us to eat around him while we, intermittently, shoved bacon pieces and steaming hot coffee down his gullet… All while Zwei tried to snatch it right out of his mouth.  
  
This was all completely normal.  
  
Or, at least, it was completely normal to me. If this household had ever been conventional, it had been forever ago. Far enough back that I, the head blonde of the house (Dad could believe what he wanted. We all knew the truth.) couldn’t remember it… Not that I could remember much after I got over getting hit with a flaming truck and waking up as a child that was 85 to 86 percent female... Or something like that. I don’t know.  
  
I was bad at standard math, sue me. Thankfully though, something as small as non-standard genders wasn’t an issue worth fighting about when you had the Faunus to pick on. Lucky me, right?  
  
Anyway, that didn't matter. What _did_ matter was that, even though Ruby and I were getting on the Bullhead to Beacon after this was over, the routine was still here...and it was comforting to find that the more things changed, the more they stayed the same… Honestly, the only thing I wasn’t going to miss was having my Dad and Uncle as our teachers. _Especially_ Dad.  
  
He ran the sex ed class. I was a growing girl. Enough said...and Ruby definitely wouldn’t miss it either. Poor thing was already having a hard enough time being who she was and she didn’t need the shadow of Dad, the sex ed teacher, hanging over her like the shadow of social death that he most _definitely_ was.  
  
The man was a huge dork at the best of times and just _how_ he’d slept with our respective moms I had no idea. Probably better that way. Some of the burns he’d sent my way over the years without even thinking about them still itched, swear to god.  
  
“Hey. Yang. I’m just wondering...” Dad, almost as if he’d heard me thinking about him, suddenly piped up in that way that always made Uncle Qrow grind his teeth in his sleep. “Are you going to take a shower?”  
  
Oh god. This again.  
  
“Took one last night,” I said around my last bacon strip. Crunchy. “I think I’m fine.”  
  
“You sure you want to do that?” Dad asked with narrowed eyes while I, being a technically mature adult, just continued to eat my breakfast... I was like, forty or something. Totally an adult. I wasn’t sweating at all, nope. “You sure you don’t want to have the freshest start at a new school that you could have?”  
  
“... God,” I grumbled. “I’m seventeen, Dad. Not seven. I look great.”  
  
And I did. I really, really did. Seriously, my hair was fucking _magic_. Also, acne. What was that? Something other people got. Ha! Suckers!  
  
“But you could look better,” Dad retorted easily, cutting off my internal gloating just before he started flicking Qrow’s forehead in an attempt to get him up. “No such thing as too much of a good impression, hon, and we’ve still got a good five hours before the bullhead comes around.”  
  
“... I guess.” With a shrug, a sigh, and one last fork full of egg, I stood up from the table, gave Ruby’s hair a good ruffle, ignored her whining, and got myself a fist bump from dad. “I’ll see you guys in thirty minutes.”  
  
“Take your time!”  
  
I rolled my eyes, went to my room, and did what I had to do. Got all the important stuff together after pulling it out of my already packed bag. Towel, conditioner, shampoo, razor. The basics. If Dad wanted anything more, he was going to have to pull it out. Nobody had time for that nonsense, especially me.  
  
A quick trip down the hall and a slammed door later, just to make sure everyone knew what I was doing and to give the last bit of oomph in waking up Qrow, the shower was running. The temperature was rising. Glass shattered and, suddenly, a once invisible short stack had me by the dick.  
  
I should have expected this. I really should have. She always came around at the worst possible time. Like a cat, yep. ‘Fed her’ at a party once, unknowingly, while she was in disguise, and now she wouldn’t leave me alone.  
  
It was flattering...as long as you ignored the fact that she was a murderous little psychopath that knew where I lived.  
  
“What did you break, Yang! That sounded expensive!”  
  
“Nothing, Dad! Cleaning it up now!” I shot back quickly before I gave the unrepentant mute that had, once again, broken into my house for some reason or another a sharp glare. “The fuck, Neo!?” I demanded with a sibilant whisper. “Again!?”  
  
In response, she just smirked at me and nodded her head. Just like always. Yet another routine that, while somewhat dysfunctional, was still rather comforting...if for different reasons. Emotional needs and sexual needs were two separate things here.  
  
I was mature enough to realize that those were two separate things. I was also mature enough to know that I actually didn’t much _care_ that she was invading my home and personal life so that we could have sex. I didn’t trust her even a fifth as far as I could throw her, sure, (which was pretty damn far) but I _did_ trust in her selfish need to unwind after...whatever it was she did when I couldn’t see her.  
  
Plausible deniability. I had that. I also had enough Aura to outlast twenty men and sexual experiences that spanned across two separate lifetimes. To use a metaphor, she may have been a psycho, but she knew where the golden eggs came from...and that was enough for me not to worry overmuch about getting stabbed for no reason.  
  
“You do know that I’m on a time limit, right? That I have stuff to do?”  
  
She raised an incredulous eyebrow at me.  
  
“Yes, I know. It’s hard to believe, but I’m not always available for sex. I have a life.”  
  
A second incredulous eyebrow joined the first as she let go of my junk and clapped her hands against her cheeks in a good approximation of ‘The Scream’.  
  
“You’re overreacting,” I said dryly as I, ironically enough, stepped into the shower spray. “And I find your disbelief offensive.”  
  
As I reached for the shampoo, I found myself stymied by the simple fact that it was no longer there. Instead, it was in the hands of a pouting Neo. A Neo that had, when I wasn’t looking at her, changed into a one-piece swimsuit. A swimsuit that had, in between the double keyhole just above and under her breasts, the words ‘Fuck These’ printed on it as a very clear invitation as she made to empty that bottle into her cleavage.  
  
The arrows pointing at said tits were even clearer.  
  
“ _Seriously, Neo_?” My voice cracked, just like my hold on my self-control as, against my wishes, I started getting hard...and I could already tell this one was going to be as good as diamonds… I had to hold back though. I had to. I was the master of my body. My body wasn’t the master of me. Zen. “That sucks as lube. Get something better.”  
  
Damn it, body! Stop fucking me over!  
  
With a smug grin, one that said that she’d expected this to happen and that she’d won something important, she dropped the shampoo on the floor and pulled a bottle of baby oil from...somewhere that I could only call ‘off-screen’, before she emptied the whole thing. The lot of it. Right over the top and straight down the center of her breasts in what might as well have been a river for all it mattered before she discarded that as well with a toss over her shoulder and a teasing shake of the chest...that worked all too damn well.  
  
Fuck it. If that was how it was going to be, that was how it was going to be. One thing though, before anything else.  
  
With a casual push against the center of her chest with the tip of a finger, that smile on her face disappeared as she began to tilt...and the oil that had pooled at her feet swept her right off them.  
  
A big part of this thing between us was about respect. If I didn’t push back every once in a while, then she wouldn’t respect me. Simple power dynamics here...but I wasn’t a dick. She didn’t even come close to hitting the floor before I was looking down at her, amused by the wide look of her eyes as they began to shift in color. Pink, to white, to brown in a cycle while I held her in my arms, up until she realized what she was doing and brought it to a stop with a scowl.  
  
“What?” I asked innocently, “I thought you wanted me to pin you down and fuck your tits. Was I wrong?”  
  
A raised middle finger and a flash of teeth in what might have been a smile was my answer...and it was good enough for me to lay her down and admire just how freaking _small_ she was for a good second before I was on her. Literally on her, as in lightly sitting on her stomach, using my weight to keep her and with my dick as I laid my dick out on her body for a good preview shot...and I easily went past her chest in terms of length, as expected. All it would take is a short thrust forward—  
  
Neo blinked, her eyes now completely pink in that particular way they became when she was unbelievably aroused as the head of my erection bounced off her lower lip.  
  
—and I’d be in her mouth… _Awesome._  
  
“You should probably keep your tongue out, sweety. Just because I’m only doing this once doesn’t mean a thing.” I giggled, feeling more than just a little surreal as I pulled back, took her breasts in hand and pushed them together, then lined my cock up with her _extremely_ inviting cleavage. “You asked for this, so you’d better be willing to clean up the mess _you_ made.”  
  
I took my time sliding myself into that valley. Warm, tight. Delightfully _slick_ as my dick, inch by inch, vanished in the space between her tits... I could feel her shaking as I did so. Vibrating with frustration, her still pink eyes narrowed into playfully angry slits when I began to in and out of her chest. Back and forward, slow and gentle, never quite reaching the other side for her to see.  
  
In other words, I was doing everything but what she really wanted...and her impotent anger was _delicious._ She’d come to me. Not the other way around. If I wanted to enjoy myself for a little while (Dad had said five hours, right?) I would… If I could have.  
  
This was the only bathroom in the house and I wasn’t the only person in said house. Even if I had planned on screwing Neo into the floor, mentally (handholding and missionary.) or physically (hair pulling and mating presses.) this wasn’t the time for it.  
  
This was my choice. My responsibility... And the fact that she’d opened her mouth as wide as it could go, stuck her tongue out, and started licking at the air just above where my dick would come out if I just stopped fucking around and just _fucked her tits already_ just helped me make that choice faster.  
  
I’d just have to make it up to her later, I supposed.  
  
On the next upstroke, I went all in. All the way to the base with a solid _smack_ that had sent a wave of visible force through her tits. A ripple that I could even see under the saran wrap tightness of her swimsuit, just before the head of my dick popped out from in between her breasts and right on the flat of her tongue. A momentary thing that had her eyes pop open with excitement as she finally got a taste of the good stuff.  
  
At this point, I was leaking like a sieve...and she’d be _damned_ if she lost whatever I gave her in the oil slick she’d made of her chest. Not due to any real appreciation of my taste (maybe?) that I could tell, no, but she knew what got me going by now. What to do for that extra hint of enthusiasm, of implied _aggression_ , that drove her crazy.  
  
It made her _easy._  
  
A slut for conflict was Neo. A really classy lady, for a given value of class...and if she wasn't on the verge of orgasm already, a hard twist of her nipples through her clothing had her flying right past that and straight to becoming undone. Kicking her legs. Spasming. Making barely audible huffing noises in between gasps for air as I felt her stomach contract through my nuts as they dragged along her torso.  
  
She was laughing...and I could see that her eyes were already beginning to lose their focus as I started using her as if she was just a toy. No sweet talk. No consideration. Just the sounds of an animalistic mating, hard dick-flesh against tit as my cock worked the increasingly thickening mess in between her breasts into a leather. A bubbling, sticky morass of pre and oil that, if I hadn’t been in the middle of something _important_ , would have worried me if only for the _sound_ it was making.  
  
It was like hearing quicksand, stuck on repeat. That was the closest thing I could think of the describe it. The sucking, slapping, _pounding_ that was my length being run through the makeshift pseudo-pussy that Neo had offered up to me for the sake of getting her weekly fix. The chances that someone could hear me right then were high. The chances that I much cared were low...and only getting lower as every drop of water that struck my hair turned to steam.  
  
It was flashy, sure, but I couldn’t help how my body worked. I wasn’t going to be faking an orgasm anytime soon, I’d say that, and if Neo hadn’t been so out of it, she would have caught onto that before I sank in, balls deep, and she found herself with a mouthful of throbbing cockhead, just at the verge of orgasm.  
  
“You’ve been a good girl, keeping your mouth open for me,” I cooed quietly to Neo as I watched the light return to her eyes. Felt her tongue, after a short period of startled stillness, begin lashing the underside of my glans like a thing possessed. “But are you ready to clean up the mess you made, you needy little bitch?”  
  
When she dipped her head forward to take in yet more of me, I took that as a yes. As good as a nod as her lips puckered around me and she started to suck...damn.  
  
There were a lot of reasons as to why trying to talk to a mute girl that refused to learn standardized sign language was a terrible slog to get through, but this sure as _fuck_ wasn’t one of them. It was most likely better that way, once I thought about it. If she had actually been capable of speech…  
  
I shuddered to think about it, even as a familiar pressure began to build up below my waist. Hard and quick, as hot as lava as I reflexively grabbed ice cream girl by the hair, grit my teeth...and gave the room a tint of gold as I unloaded into her suckling mouth. Pulse after pulse went straight down her hungry throat without pause, the sound of her swallowing each rope of jizz the loudest noise she’d made all day by far as she tried to keep up...and her cheeks only puffed out twice this time, with her glaring ‘angrily’ at me all the while as she chugged me down.  
  
The first time she’d tried that, it had exploded out of her nose and I hadn’t seen her for a month after because she’d needed to salve her wounded pride and clean her sinuses. Good times… The sound of her lips smacking loudly around my length was enough for me to push those memories to the side. The feeling of her teeth grazing me got me right into the moment, my heart jumping right into my throat as any slack in my dick instantly disappeared and I was fully erect once more.  
  
Danger to life and limb was a hell of a libido enhancer...and, once again, Neo made me wonder if the phrase ‘Cock Hungry’ referred to her. If not, it should. It wouldn’t be all that much of a surprise to me if I found out that someone had replaced the current picture in the dictionary with a picture of her looking up at the viewer with a cock swollen cheek. She had already finished off what I had shot off into her mouth and was intentionally licking me off as loudly as possible so that she could get _more_.  
  
She always did this. Always tried to push me more and more, further and further, anything to get just one more round. _Always_ , even if she knew that I was on a time-limit...and I was ashamed to say that she’d won more than one of those struggles. A birthday party here, a graduation there. Things like that… It was too bad, for her, that I had the willpower of a hundred mounti-OH FUCK, NO!  
  
I let go of her hair, my face tight and emotions controlled as I extracted myself from the not-so-hidden cum vampire that had just tried to suck my soul out...and it might have worked too, seeing just how deep her cheeks had been before I broke the seal with an ear-ringing pop.  
  
I had to admit that I’d almost nutted again right there...but I hadn’t. And this was a two player game...one where I knew her entire move set, front to back.  
  
With a swift, yet controlled movement, I extracted my now half erect cock out from the keyhole of her swimsuit while she looked up at me expectantly. Even more so as I dragged my dick straight down her stomach and right over her mound, leaving an off-white slug trail wherever it went… Up until I slid my hands under her armpits, stood, and held her up high, at eye level against the nearest wall.  
  
She bit her lower lip at me, expecting a ravaging. I smiled back all teeth as, well… I planted a warm, loving kiss on her forehead.  
  
After that, it was like I had flipped a switch. She went from expectedly lustful to adorably embarrassed. Her face flushed red, her eyes turned white, and she started to slap at my own breasts rapidly. Not nearly hard enough to actually hurt me, but still hard enough to make it sting as I laughed at her.  
  
Affection. Her one weakness. Her kryptonite...and the only way to make her leave when she didn’t want to.  
  
“You’re so adorable!” I continued my assault, her features stuck in a rictus of horror as I hugged her tight to my bosom...and then she was gone. Like greased lightning, she easily slipped out of my grasp, out of the shower, and back out the window in a blur of tiny mute anger while I shook my head at what might have been her general direction, still laughing the entire time.  
  
“Demands I fuck her tits,” I chuckled to myself, “but god forbid I give her a hug… Fucking weirdo… Stupid, sexy-”  
  
“YANG!”  
  
Startled, I spun around on my heel...and did it three times more than I’d been going for as I found myself standing in a puddle of barely diluted oil. That I didn’t fall down was pure luck.  
  
That I ended up in an actually decent pointe stance without a pair of ballet shoes was a miracle.  
  
“I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT YOU’RE DOING IN THERE, AND I DON’T REALLY CARE, PERVERT!” The door shook as Ruby pounded her fist against the door. “I. NEED. TO. PEE!”  
  
“I’ll be right out!” I yelled back, slightly dizzy as I sat down on the shower alcove, got the detachable shower head with one hand, and started washing away the evidence...and working shampoo into my hair with my other hand. This wasn’t my first rodeo...and god bless my semblance for its instant drying utility. I’d never get anywhere on time otherwise. “Just need to rinse my hair, Rubaby, the light of my life!”  
  
“ ** _YANG!_** ”  
  
… Today was a good day...and it was going to be all uphill from here.


	2. Chapter 2

“You’re not going to leave me alone again, are you?” Ruby, with her hand wrapped tightly around my wrist, asked suspiciously as we gave the vomiting, miserable blonde in our way a wide berth. I’d avoided getting vomit on my shoes the first time, and I wasn’t all that keen on rolling the dice once more; Uncle Qrow had soured me on playing with chance and luck...that and board games that involved actual dice in some way. Or cards. Or coin flips. Or spinning wheels... Family Night was hard and Spruce Willis sucked. “You’re not going to ‘go to the bathroom’ and leave me alone for a while so that I can get a taste of independence again, are you?”  
  
That hadn’t been why I’d been gone for that hour or so...but, sure. Let’s go with that. Independence. Not like I could say I’d been fucking someone Ruby had never met into the ground, again, now could I?  
  
She’d never met Neo. And, if I had a say in it, she never would. Hot and kinky as little miss two-tone was, introducing her to the family was never going to be in the picture. That girl was completely bugshit.  
  
“Well, better late than never, right?” I added to the conversation. “You’re a big girl, a Huntress! A savior of humanity, my little prodigy!” Within the first five minutes of getting off the ship, I was forced to blind Ruby with a quick and affectionate tousling of her hair as something, or someone, got themselves caught at the corner of my eye. “You’ve got this!”  
  
… It was Neo. It was Neo, doing Neo things, while being Neo. Because of course it was.  
  
It hadn’t taken Neo all that long to get over herself today after my bout of forceful affection. Thankfully though, this time, when she noticed me noticing her, instead of being difficult, she got herself out of sight before Ruby could see her signing rude and suggestive things at me. We’d have had to have a _talk_ if that had been the case...and I wasn’t feeling up to that right now. I was just hoping that no one ever connected that broken toilet on the ship to me. Or the mess… Oh, Brothers, the _mess_.  
  
“You can’t expect me to hold your hand all the time, can you?” I continued playfully, pushing that problem away until I was forced to deal with it, or not, as the case may be. “Besides, I’m in the same boat as you are now, you know? We’ve always had Dad and Uncle Qrow nearby, even at Signal.” I shrugged and gave her a grin. “We all have to grow up sometime. We gotta do what we gotta do.”  
  
Honestly, this situation had me just as lost as she was, if not more. I was being serious here. I’d never been all that good at directions…and I’d always had someone nearby to help me with whatever I needed help with. It was like moving out of my mom’s house all over again… Anyway, I wasn’t messing with her here. I was a very different sort of mother figure than the original Yang had been, more the subtle pavlovian type than sink or swim.  
  
I’d like to think I’d done a pretty good job of raising her, considering.  
  
Humans were animals, pure and simple. I was, she was, you was. All animals. If a cookie every time Ruby did something good made her into a better person, I’d give her all the cookies she wanted...and it seemed to have worked pretty darn well. She was a good girl, my sister Rubes. Straight A’s, never been in trouble with the law, didn’t do drugs and she sometimes _tried_ to kick me during a spar.  
  
She might have had more cavities than normal, but oh well. Sacrifices for the cause.  
  
I was proud of her… Even if she could be a cheeky little thing when she put her mind to it, the grumbled belligerent nonsense coming out of her mouth as she pulled her hair out of her face the final proof of such. So ungrateful.  
  
“First impressions are important, Ruby. I taught you that, didn’t I?” I put both my hands on her shoulders and gave them a squeeze. “When you meet someone for the first time, someone you think could be your friend, do you _really_ want to have your lame big sister around to cramp your style? Heck,” my tone switched to a teasing one. “What if you meet the love of your life out here? Today even? Oh, the _scandal_.”  
  
I saw that I’d got through to her when she looked up at me from under her fringe and gave me a slap with a touch of whine. I’d always been kind of _weird_. A little too mature for most people my age to feel completely comfortable around me… Of course, my charisma and my **_charisma_** helped deal with little things like that over time as I started to grow into myself, but still. Ruby deserved to be able to socialize without this large-breasted albatross around her neck.  
  
That was the idea anyway. Also, I needed to go talk to someone before they started setting shit on fire and raiding the school’s freezer. There were better ways for the school year to start and that definitely wasn’t one of them.  
  
“We’ve got twenty minutes till orientation. Plenty of time to do some people watching.” With one last squeeze and a little, but extended, shake that didn’t stop until she cracked a grin of her own, I let her go. “Don’t be afraid to say hi to people, even if it's just a wave. That gets your foot in the door and that helps a lot more than you’d think. Also, if someone gets fresh with you or acts like a dick, I’ll sort them out in the ring for you. You’ve got nothing to worry about.” I then pointed dramatically out into the grounds, ignoring how that last part of my speech had turned my sister’s smile into a frozen line. “Now go forth, young hero! Go forth and become a legend!”  
  
Ruby paled. An achievement, seeing as she never went outside if she could help it. “Yang! Quit it!” She hissed and flapped her hands at me and looked around as...absolutely no one looked at us. We’d been standing here for a while. Anyone that could have heard us had better things to do. “What are you doing!?”  
  
Annoying her with her childhood so that she’d clear out faster, clearly. It had been one of the ways I’d tried raising her confidence when we were younger... She might have been embarrassed _now_ , but there was a time when playing the knight and hero was the only game she’d ever wanted to play...and it hadn’t been all that long ago. Four years, maybe? A little after she’d picked up Crimson Rose, yeah.  
  
Ah, childish things… How quick we are to put you away.  
  
“I know not of what you speak.” I rose my voice further, higher. Still not high enough for anyone to hear, but more than enough to get Ruby flapping her hands like she was trying to take flight while her lips puckered up in her panic. “Have I done something to offend you, chosen one? Was there something in my words that was not to your liking? Was my quest not clear, mayhaps?”  
  
Ruby whined at me some more, but finally took the hint and began to trudge along when I pointed extra hard. “So embarrassing… How could you do... Why did you have to bring that up… _In public._ ”  
  
“Because I want to see you grow up healthy and strong and socially well-adjusted!” I called after her, making her eep and add some power to that walk, her head turning back to look at me to see if I was following after her… And if she moved any faster she’d be jogging. Like a normal person even. Amazing. “Love you to bits, Rubaby! Go get em’, Champ! Mwah, kisses!”  
  
Annnnd there she went. Nothing but air and rose petals and the lingering whiff of traumatized teenager. My work here as primary, **secondary** , parental figure was done for now...but I couldn’t rest. I could never rest.  
  
My side-job as a minder/living sex toy to a murderously hot, mute, shortstack didn’t allow for it...not that I was complaining. Mostly.  
  
Really, I enjoyed the sex. Adored it, actually. I wasn’t going to lie. It was never dull or boring; a shot of adrenaline straight to the heart. Not putting your dick in crazy might have been common sense but, god damn it, there was a _reason_ why people did it anyway...but it could get kind of tiring sometimes. A hassle.  
  
Neo only possessed the very barest hints of empathy from what I could tell, and even then I had to wonder if they were real. Probably not. When she put her mind to it, she was a brilliant actor… I wasn’t sure what word I’d use to describe her that didn’t involve a part of her body, other than one that ended in -pathy. Socio. Psycho. One of the two, along with a heavy helping of sadomasochistic tendencies and what I suspected was an untreated case of ADHD with impulse control issues. Not exactly a combination that screamed mental wellness and safety.  
  
I amused her. I was interesting. I fucked like a champion and I wasn’t afraid to hit a lady if they were into that sort of thing…or not, as the case may be...she liked her roleplay. It got kind of weird sometimes.  
  
Anyway, that all gave me more than a little leeway with her. More than she’d give to anyone else I knew anyway...enough that I often got my way more often than not as long as I made myself clear about what I wanted and why she should go along with it.  
  
It was like herding cats. I liked to think I was pretty good at it.  
  
At the end of my ambling, directionless walk to the dark side of the tree that she’d vanished behind, I took a lean. Kicked a leg up and tasted the lingering scent of vanilla ice-cream on my tongue, one of the many varying flavors that hung around the shorter woman like a cloud. Still here then...and I preferred chocolate. That was just me though. “Following me to school now, huh? How sweet. Did you remember to bring me lunch, hon?”  
  
The ice cream cone that came at my face, straight out of the shattered mirror of her Semblance with the deadly seriousness of a spear thrust, was avoided with aplomb. It had been expected, and that had been enough. She’d never been able to resist the path of least resistance when it came to comedy, and force-feeding whatever she had on hand into me until I choked on it was exactly the sort of thing that she’d think was funny.  
  
The Dane Cook school of laughs, essentially. A classic.  
  
“Nice to see you too,” I replied dryly as I plucked the cone out of her hands on the withdrawal and gave it a lick. Then, proving that she hadn’t been trying all that hard to keep it out of my grasp, she took a bite from her own cone and gave me the finger. If she’d actually been _trying_ , I’d have been fighting off the end of her sword right now. A gracious loser, she was not. “We were apart for all of half an hour. I wasn’t sure what I’d do without your warm and caring personality around to brighten my day...but, yeah. Serious talk.” I crossed an arm under my chest and raised a brow at her. “What are you doing here, Neo? This is a little - bold, isn’t it? Shouldn't you be in Vale or something right now?”  
  
A dismissive flap of the hand was the answer to my question. Then came the distraction. Fluttering lashes, swinging hips. Her cozying up to my side; looking up at me and playing up just how small and cute and utterly _helpless_ she was...and I had to admit. It was pretty good.  
  
Not good enough to get her anywhere though. I wasn't feeling anywhere close to hormonal at the moment. If Neo had wanted this to work, she should have thought of that before she helped take the edge off of me. Twice.  
  
“Quit it. I'm being serious. Seriously serious even.” I began the process of removing her from my side, a process that was a great deal like pulling tape off of hair. “You've already used up all my free time for the day, Neo. I've got shit to do, fifteen minutes before someone realizes I'm missing, and screwing in public isn't in my itinerary for the week. If you're thinking of hanging around here, don’t. You're going to be bored as shit.”  
  
Her eyes grew a size larger at that and her lower lip started to wobble. She was just trying to annoy me now. The several submission holds she’d just tried to put me in before I broke them, the lot of them disguised as hyperactive and possessive clinging, said as much… They would have hurt too. A lot. That was experience talking.  
  
Arms are not meant to bend that way. Or wrists. Or fingers… Whatever. If there was one good thing that could be said about her, it was that she’d taught me more about fighting humans in a month than four years worth of classes. Pain was a damn skilled teacher and, if Neo was anything, she wasn't all that shy about handing it out like candy. That was a good thing.  
  
Considering how unlikely it was that my terminal case of biggus girlus dickus had erased Salem from existence, I was going to need it at some point. Sweat on the mat and blood on the field or however that saying went… I wasn’t much of a poet.  
  
“Look. Give me the week off to get my shit together, a week and some change at the most…” A lazy kick from me had Neo twirling off of me to avoid it, right on the heel of her pretty white boots until she stopped on the fourth rotation to give me a considering look... That patch of grass would never be the same. “And I’ll take you out somewhere nice for the weekend.”  
  
With a slow roll of the hand as the considering look turned to outright interest, she gave me permission to continue. How nice of her. She hadn’t even tried to stab me in the instep.  
  
“Drinking, dancing, beating up pushy assholes. That one ultra-deluxe sundae bowl you like that costs more than my loadout.” I pushed off the tree when she started clapping and skipping in place, the promise of us getting white-girl wasted and all you can eat ice cream on my dime more than enough to make her lose control of herself for a second. “Then I’m thinking we’ll buy out a hotel room for a couple hours and use the bed until it breaks.”  
  
Neo stopped dancing with an excited ‘gasp’ and did a quick approximation of sticking a needle in her eye… Where was the rest? Dunno. I suspected that was the only part of the saying she knew or even cared about.  
  
“Oh, yeah. Promise.” I held out a pinky and wriggled it until she caught on and hooked it with her own. “Going to be _allll_ kinds of pent up by then too.” With a hum, a shake, and a slap of the hand drifting towards my junk, the pact was made. Give the girl an inch and she’d take a foot (I was such a wit), I swear. “We’re going to have to break out the rain gear for this one, so says Yang Xiao-Long...and I need to go.”  
  
After polishing off the last of my cone and, shame of shames, licking my fingers clean when I remembered that I didn’t have any napkins, I made to leave in the same manner as I’d arrived. Aimlessly. Neo’s sullen pout as I left, thanks to knowing her for as long as I had, had no effect besides me promising to send her a text sometime next week… I wasn’t looking forward to it.  
  
Mute or not, there was _never_ a good reason to speak to someone entirely in Emojis. **_None_**.  
  
==========  
  
I sniffed. Loud, exaggerated.  
  
Ruby shied away. Clumsy, not at all subtle as we waited for Ozpin to come up on stage and be super vague and weird… Funny that. After all these years, that was pretty much all I could remember about him… Other than him being really fucking old and shit at relationships. Or something. Twenty years, give or take a year, made keeping shit straight in my head kind of hard sometimes. “Yang, I’m _fine_.”  
  
That I couldn’t smell spent fire Dust on her, more than I normally could anyway, said as much...but that wasn’t enough for me. I had to make _extra sure_.  
  
“Yeah. I can see that. You don’t smell like fire and brimstone, for one. I’ll admit that I thought, considering how you were acting, that twenty minutes of freedom might have been little too much for you to handle. I’m proud of you.” I reached out and pulled her close with a side hug. The struggle she put into escaping, what there was of it, didn’t last long. “Did you meet someone nice though? A friend? _Better_ than a friend? A guy? A girl? A living weapon of mass destruction pretending to be a really awkward and adorable human girl? I don’t judge.”  
  
Ruby, instead of answering, slowly and methodically pulled her hood up and over her head and proceeded to pretend that I didn’t exist. Yep. She was fine. Completely fine.  
  
“That wasn’t a no~”  
  
Deathly embarrassed, sure, but fine. Sister things...and, meh. Sticking to a script was for suckers.


	3. Chapter 3

The experience that was hearing Ozpin give a speech was almost entirely like I thought it was going to be. Cryptic as shit and kinda rambly, in other words. There was some deepness to it, yeah, but it was the sort of deepness that you’d expect off of the contents of a fortune cookie.  
  
‘Think for yourselves’ and ‘only you can choose your destiny’ type stuff. Not exactly fresh material… Of course, that probably had been pretty cool at the time he’d made it up. Or heard it. Whatever. He was thousands of years old or something. If being middle-aged got you set in your ways, his habits must have been made out of bedrock.  
  
… I now had to wonder just how long he’d been throwing kids off of cliffs and into Grimm infested forests. Or the equivalent of such... Whatever had been available at the time. Catapults, maybe? Trebuchets? Something older? Like, I dunno, _physically throwing them_?  
  
We had, as a people, just started using the very most basic forms of mechashift weaponry in the last century. Who knew what he’d been up to before remote cameras had made everything interesting? Not me, clearly and _goddamn_ was I glad that anyone with an Aura hit an eight on the hotness scale, easily, if not better. Whether that was due to Aura making people more beautiful in itself, or just the Brothers deciding they wanted their science project to be pretty to look at, I had no clue.  
  
Anyway, besides that, having to sleep in the cafeteria with a bunch of sweaty, morbidly obese weirdos with superpowers would have really made me rethink this entire thing, if anything did, for one simple reason.  
  
Mistral existed. They had a roaring comic book industry, some of it not exactly safe-for-work. That was not a good thing.  
  
Doujins weren’t all that much different from what they’d been in my former life. I could read a bad situation when I saw one and that one would have definitely been a bad situation. I was already going to have to deal with hormonal douchebags as it was (Yes, I can see you flexing over there, and I am not impressed) and I didn’t need narrative forces against me as well. Enough said.  
  
Anyway, forget all that. It was time for me to do my job. Not the Neo one. Or the dutiful daughter one, no. The _other_ one.  
  
“So, Ruby. Come on. Spill. Reveal your secrets.” A nudge with my shoulder into hers nearly had her tipping over, the only thing keeping her up being some sideways skipping that had me rolling my eyes. So _dramatic_. “Did you meet someone cool? Don’t leave me here, sitting in suspense.”  
  
Being the overbearing but well-meaning older sibling/mother figure was a full-time job. Ever vigilant, that was me.  
  
“Why shouldn’t I?” Ruby huffed back at me with faux-offense as she smoothed out the thin fabric of her strawberry-themed sleeping shirt in that clumsily dismissive way she’d grown into over the years. The one she did when she realized that people could see her...sometimes. It was adorable when she forgot. And hilarious, even with the consoling I had to do to get her out of her hood. “You embarrassed me in front of the entire school-”  
  
“All of two people besides us,” I pointed out slowly. Reasonably too, in my opinion. “Everyone else was already gone. And it's not like any of them _cared_. We aren’t the center of the world, you know?”  
  
Schnee was, clearly. 3D animation hadn’t done nearly enough justice to the size or amount of her luggage and…and I hadn’t even _talked_ to her yet, and I already knew her voice was going to grate on me something fierce. She hadn’t exactly been _shy_ about making noise earlier over something or other, I’d say that, and it hadn’t exactly left the best impression.  
  
Jaune (That was his name, right?) had a bunny onesie and some mussed up hair. You’d literally just met...no. Not even that. You’d picked him out of a crowd. No need to talk down on him in front of everyone like that… The more things changed, eh?  
  
“ _The entire_ ** _school_** ,” Ruby asserted under her breath as she took the chance to slide down the nearest wall with her sleeping pack in her arms, ready and waiting to be unfolded into its chocolate-brick and marshmallow pattern splendor. Best three-hundred Lein I’d ever spent on a birthday, yep. “I’m not happy with you right now.”  
  
One of my brows slowly began to rise right after she went silent. Higher. Higher… A little more while I opened my own pack...and I nodded. “So you _did_ make a friend.”  
  
“I didn’t say anything like that!”  
  
“You don’t have to. Didn’t.” I nodded again. “You’re doing that thing you do. You know.” A hand to each side of my cheeks with a tap outlined exactly what I meant. “Smiling.”  
  
That wasn’t much by itself, really. It wasn’t like Ruby gave out smiles sparingly or anything...but, depending on how she reacted to this...  
  
“S-so what if I am? There’s nothing wrong with that,” Ruby challenged me outright, her smile changing to a frown and back as if it was unsure on what it wanted to be. “I’m allowed to smile! Why does me smiling have to have any meaning to it?”  
  
“Oh… Well. When you put it like that...” A look across the way at the ginger waving madly in our general direction, and Ruby’s own twitching fingers as she fought to keep her hand down, put the lie to her defense. That I was the one to return the waving with one of my own didn’t seem to bother Ruby’s new friend in the slightest. She just added another hand for double the waving while my tone went dry. “You might have a point there. I’m sorry for questioning you.”  
  
With some grumpy staring and mumbling at me to start off with, Ruby gave up the withered corpse of her argument and joined in on the disconnected sea of enthusiastically flapping arms.  
  
“Fine. You got me. Her name is Nora and she’s really nice.” Ruby and I quit waving in jerky tandem when Nora’s friend quietly interrupted her with a hand on her shoulder, stopping our greeting ritual in that way only lifelong friends could do; with a look and a touch. How sweet. “There aren’t a lot of people that know their weapons as close as she does.” She hummed a dreamy sound that could have only been for one reason. “Magnhild is _amazing_ … Nothing on Crescent Rose, of course, but...”  
  
“Of course not. You don’t need to explain. The thought had never crossed my mind.” I assured her, unphased by her playfully flat look as I slid into my own sleeping bag; a ‘Ladies and the Beast’ limited edition, one of fifty ever made for a lottery and Hunter rated… I’d had to insist on that last part. It had been one of my better life choices and I’d never had cause to regret it…yet. If anyone knew the source material, they weren't owning up to it. “But, come on. We’ve got a big day tomorrow. Initiation and all that. Sleep.”  
  
“Blah, blaaah, blaaaaaah.”  
  
“... Oh. I see how it is. Well, if that’s how you’re going to be, even after I asked after your day…” I sniffed. “Blah to you too. Blah and humbug.”  
  
She giggled at that, leaving me with one last retort as her face disappeared into the depths of her bag where my words couldn’t reach her. “You’re such a _dork_.”  
  
… My heart. How would I ever recover? Oh. I know.  
  
Pulling the bag up to my chin, I went to sleep. Like a baby... A genius baby.  
  
All according to plan...and tomorrow was going to be _great_.  
  
==========  
  
Nine in the morning. The start of the week. A Monday, standing out in the open and on top of a cliff; overlooking an idyllic forest expanse that espoused the glory of Nature and all its wonders just by existing (as long as you ignored the endless streams of murder beasts inside of it)… It was nice, I guess. A good place for a picnic. Or making out… Or picnics and making out… Once again, it was nice.  
  
Too bad I already hated it. In another life, we could have been friends...but it seemed that was not to be.  
  
“Is your sister alright?” I heard Nora ask Ruby at a loud-whisper, one that was in no way subtle even against the ever-present backdrop of other student whispers. Get more than five of us together and there’ll be whispers. That’s a fact. A hateful, hateful fact. “She’s been staring at the forest for the last five minutes now, and I don’t think she’s stopped frowning since she woke up.”  
  
I slowly turned my head, giving my slightly blurry vision time to focus into its rightful laser-like intensity for optimum transfixing… How was I supposed to put the fear of god into my enemies and innocent bystanders without laser-like intensity? Was such a thing possible, or was it only myth?  
  
Gift upon me thy secrets, oh harsh and uncaring reality.  
  
Ruby took her time in answering, spending it on fiddling with the inner lining of her cloak as I caught my bearings and pushed off the fog. “She’s - not all that good with mornings.” She shook her head and let her cloak fall. “Or Mondays. All of the coffee at breakfast being purely for the staff didn’t help either. Or having to share - accommodations with so many people.” Ruby lowered her voice into a whisper of her very own, one that happened to be much more successful than the last...not that that was hard. “And I don’t think she likes that one girl. The loud one with the white hair and the-”  
  
My frown deepened. Weiss had made it quite obvious this morning that she’d never had to wait for the bathroom before...while I was using it. I wasn’t sure _how_ I could be less impressed with her, but she was really working on it.  
  
“Stick up her butt?”  
  
… No. Too easy. The very meaning of ‘low-hanging fruit’. Leave it be.  
  
“Yeah, her.” Ruby sighed. “Yang is just being grumpy. Give her an hour.”  
  
“Ahhhh… Say no more. I understand.” Nora intoned with a sympathetic nod and eyes full of exaggerated pity. “Renny’s the same way when he doesn’t get his daily green tea and thirty minutes of close physical contact. He’s very sensitive, you see. Gets all emotional and everything without them.”  
  
‘Renny’, like the highly intelligent individual he clearly was, continued to pretend that he wasn’t a part of the conversation happening three feet away from him. If he’d even noticed, he wasn’t owning up to it that I could see… That was the face of a man that would clean up at poker. It was like looking at a marble statue. Goddamn.  
  
The loud _kchack_ of someone getting thrown off a cliff had me, regretfully, shelving my book plans in favor of pulling my goggles out of my collar and slapping them on. It might not have been _necessary_ or anything, seeing as Aura’s uses were many and varied...but whatever. They made me look cool and were actually _useful_.  
  
Aviator shades, funnily enough, didn’t do very well when it came to staying on while Hunters did Hunter things. Some people got it to work, of course, but I’d just never, personally, got the hang of it. Never saw the point. Learning how to keep shades on while doing backflips and breaking the sound barrier while doing so had never been a major part of my priorities.  
  
I was already awesome. Trying too hard would just mess up my ‘easy-cool’ image… How would people continue to respect me if I switched my paradigm up like that? Gotta be yourself, man, and stick to your guns. That was the only way to live...and I put a lot of effort into looking this easy-going.  
  
What? Do you think people just - _wake up -_ looking like this? Hell no. Looking this good took _time_ and _effort_ … Some serious prep, at the least. Unlike some people, I didn’t have the time to spend a couple of hours in the restroom on waking up and another few hours on going to sleep. Of course not. Ridiculous.  
  
My hair was just past shoulder length for a _reason_.  
  
“See you at the bottom, sis. Watch out for those trees.” Ruby, as the last person before me on the firing line, stuck her tongue out at me and made a ‘bleh’ noise before blasting off, the ungrateful little shit.  
  
I’d essentially raised her and that was how she treated me? In public even? _Actual public_? I’d told her about that one time I’d toppled a tree with my face in confidence! This level of escalation, even if only hinted at, in our game of siblings-and-blackmail was completely unwarranted!  
  
When my time came I was ready. Knees bent and jaw set. Fists up and ready to punch that fucking _bird_ (a baby Nevermore, I was glad to see) that had decided to get in my way when things kicked off. When _I_ kicked off, the pad and a double handful of shot behind me were more than enough to do what I’d set out to do.  
  
I punched the bird. Fighting type against flying and fighting won. That was a given...but that was just a single step in my grand plan.  
  
My landing strategy was simple. Well tested. Didn’t involve me leaving cartoonish imprints in anything solid that might have gotten in the way or becoming a smear on the floor. All the important parts, really, even if it wasn’t particularly fancy or extra when compared to some of the things my peers got up to… The only difference to it was that, this time, I was intentionally going for speed over distance.  
  
Another shot pushed me _just_ past Ruby, already firing her gun into the forest as a quick and dirty lithobraking. One that was instantly plugged into the on the fly physics equations that were beaten into every Hunter child by the age of nine. The sort of shit that would have had rational scientists tearing their hair out and supercomputers going overtime, crunched and processed by instinct; nothing more than a means to an end for the both of us to look as cool as possible while I rolled through the treetops and missed every branch on the way down.  
  
Well...almost every branch. I didn’t have X-Ray vision, or precognition, sadly. My life would have been all kinds of different if I did... Though, seeing as I’d hit every one of those branches feet first, snapping them like twigs instead of the multi-hundred pound and foot-thick monstrosities that they were as they worked to slow me down, I felt that I could be forgiven.  
  
Most landing strategies involved you getting to the ground as quickly as possible, not staying up in the air for extended periods of time. Funny how that worked. Considering the objective, it made sense to me, seeing that Aura and Remnant material science were all kinds of bullshit, to skip all the finer points and go straight from A to B. Straight lines were the best lines.  
  
A pull of the primary and secondary triggers in my gloves to fire my heels as the forest floor came into view halved my velocity in a heartbeat. More than halved, from terminal to ‘ ** _oh fuck me that’s fast_** ’ with an earth-shattering kaboom and a wash of flames that I came out the other end of, howling with laughter (adrenaline was a hell of a thing)... Before I hit the ground and was forced to shut up before I bit my tongue, or something just as stupid.  
  
Aura or not, that fucking _hurts_.  
  
Eating the shock of my boots against the ground like the pro at falling from dangerous heights that I was, I spun on my heels and buried the pointed, scaled ends of my fingers into the dirt. Then my toes. Then another hand. Just enough that, instead of plowing into a tree as I bled off my momentum, I was now the proud owner of a five-foot, jagged line of lightly smoldering dirt and leaves.  
  
… I had to wonder if I should just let that sit or something. The only things that lived in here were Grimm, so...maybe? Whatever. Not like Smokey the Ursa was a thing here...and the teachers were watching this, right? If they wanted it put out, they’d put it out. Delegation and shifting the blame to authority figures for when something goes wrong for the win.  
  
Ruby finally made landfall as I was in the process of standing up, her back turned to me and completely oblivious to this fact as I shook off some of the more visible effects of my Semblance. Before she could make a move, probably to run off into the woods to get lost until she randomly met someone or fell off a cliff, as was her wont, I grabbed her by the shoulders.  
  
Loving. Gentle. This is how a life is taken...and she should work on her awareness some more.  
  
I felt her entire body go stiff, then lock up entirely as the first few strands of my hair came into view at the edge of her vision. “Beacon’s cycle of education is four years long, Rubes,” I whispered all friendly like into her ear. “Four. Years. Long… Oh, just _imagine_ the hell I could put you through if I turned you around right now… The _secrets_ I could tell. **_The pictures I could show_**.”  
  
“I regret everything right now,” Ruby whimpered back at me, her face pointing stiffly forward and away from mine, “and I’m sorry. Please don’t.”  
  
Letting her sweat a little longer I gave her shoulders a good squeeze. “I bet you do.” With a laugh and one last squeeze that could crack a walnut, I let her go. Turned my back and started walking off into the trees. Strolling, really… It was an art. “And I won’t. Not today, Rubaby. I’m not _that_ cruel.” With a wave back at her, I stepped behind a tree (these fuckers were _big_ ) and started towards the direction I vaguely remembered the temple being in… Vaguely. I’ll be honest. I was just rolling dice here. Not like I could turn back and ask for questions though, now could I? “Good luck! Try not to die!”  
  
The relief in Ruby’s voice as she made her escape was palpable. Adorable. Palpably adorable. “Right back at you!”  
  
Daaaaw...she wanted me to stay alive and stuff. The most basic sort of familial affection, not wanting to see your loved ones take a dirt nap... How cute. All was forgiven...not that I could tell her that. She was long gone by now, out of range before I could change my mind and subject her to a sort of torture unknown to children without siblings.  
  
Opportunities. They liked to wave at me as I went on by, those bastards.  
  
When the bushes ahead and to the side of me started rustling, I started whistling and stopped bitching. Something tuneless, but relaxed as I popped the spent shells out of my gauntlets and slipped them into a pocket in my pants for later recycling. Right, War. Left, Peace. Me in the middle, feeding into them as some fucked up metaphor for the will of the people. Vox Populi, motherfucker… It was all very deep. Remnant worthy even.  
  
Gotta fit in, don’t I?  
  
The Ursa that had just crawled out from under that there bush didn’t understand any of that though. It didn’t understand how fucked it was either. Things like metaphor and threat assessment were beyond it. All it saw was a human, doing human things, and still breathing while within easy reach. Not a Huntress, about as concerned about their black and white existence as they were about the weather.  
  
When it stood up on its hind legs to roar at me, its mouth half open as it drew in a breath, I reminded it that talking wasn’t a free action by stepping up to it. By getting _real_ deep into its personal space, still reloading the entire time...before punting the dumb animal right between the legs. Straight to the fork, hard enough for it to hop a foot in the air with a choked wail before it fell to its knees, clutching at itself with its claws and gagging.  
  
I didn’t understand _why_ they reacted like that. Like they’d just taken a shot to the undercarriage when they didn’t even have that sort of equipment...but, fuck it. They did. Even if I felt a sympathetic twinge for what I’d just done, knowing exactly how that feels, it was a minor thing when compared to the age-old war between humanity and extinction. Every weak point would be exploited, ruthlessly and without remorse.  
  
If he hadn’t wanted to get his imaginary balls busted, maybe he shouldn’t have come into range of my feet. Just a thought.  
  
“Sorry about this, but you really shouldn’t have come at me alone. Your contribution to science will be remembered,” I grumbled softly as a pull of War’s trigger into his open mouth put him out of his misery...and right into mine as my new loadout instantly proved itself to be - overly efficient. Disquietingly so as, after the smoke had cleared, I found myself staring at a still mostly intact Ursa.  
  
Arms, legs, body. All there. The top of his head though...uh… Shit. That wasn’t good.  
  
“Maybe I should adjust the mix on this some more...”  
  
The only part of his head that still existed was his lower jaw and, grossly enough, his tongue. Like - his entire tongue, just flopping out where his mouth used to be and onto his neck as a big, gross red mass… And I could see the rest of his skull right behind him, his brainpan or brainpan equivalent, turning to ash at the base of a tree ten yards away while lit by a sickly blue and somewhat acrid flame.  
  
Nobody needed to see that. Nope. That was the sort of thing hell was made of.  
  
“Yeah. That might be a good idea. Fix it. Remnant doesn’t have treaties against war crimes yet.” I nodded to myself. Booted the still kneeling corpse over to the side to get it out of my line of fire as the bushes that unlucky Grimm had come out off began to rustle once more and I switched to ‘basic’ rounds. You know. The ones that everyone else used in some way or another. How _boring_. “I probably shouldn’t give them any ideas.”  
  
I wasn’t going to give this mix up, of course. Big problems needed big solutions. But, still...no one had to know that this was a thing that I’d just done… Or that I’d been mixing Willie Pete with Fire Dust flakes to see what would happen for that matter.  
  
That White Phosphorus had never been seriously considered for its military uses when Dust was a thing (an, admittedly, _magical thing_ ) didn’t matter. Hugging jackets and padded rooms weren’t exactly in season… Let alone proprietary lawsuits, prompted by non-Schnee chemical/mineral additions to Schnee brand Dust crystals that affected their use or properties.  
  
That wasn’t a joke. That had been in the warranty and everything...and everything was Schnee Dust these days, so it wasn’t like I could just go around them _._ Not unless I wanted to go to Vacuo and trawl the bazaars...but fuck that. I wasn’t made of money. Also, fuck sand, man.  
  
Fucking _Schnee_.  
  
The bushes stopped rustling and Weiss (I’d recognize that stupid tiara anywhere) stumbled out of the brush, cursing under her breath as she picked a twig out of her dress...and looked up.  
  
Irony.  
  
Silence. Long, horrified, silence. Silence so powerful that it was nearly a sound of its own as she made eye contact with me… Half of an eye, to be specific, seeing as the other half of her face was behind the protective wall that was an upraised, and lightly steaming, Peace.  
  
The goggles. They did nothing. _Shit_.  
  
“Oh. It’s you.” The flat expression on her face slowly morphed into a polite (that was, indeed, a thing) sneer. “The _Brute_.”  
  
I swear to god, I almost pulled the trigger right then and there, right into her face. Not one of my proudest moments.  
  
She’d have lived, sure, seeing as Peace lived up to its name when used in its secondary function. She wouldn’t have been all that _happy_ about being alive, of course, but she would be alive...and she wouldn’t be complaining about the quality of the school’s toilet paper anymore. Or how long I’d taken to do my hair.  
  
A single comment from me about how the ‘rough’ makeup of the paper had clearly led to her getting a terrible case of booty hurt had really lightened up our collective mornings. Like a garbage-fire lit up a piss-soaked alleyway.  
  
It had been a party, alright...and, damn. My early morning blues were going _strong_ today. Pull it back, girl. She’s a bitch, sure, but an inter-student body maiming on the first day of school was a little much, don’t you think? Give it some time.  
  
“... No. I refuse. I won’t allow it.” She turned around and made to head right back into the brush she’d just came out of. “Anyone else would do. Anyone at all,” She muttered under her breath, nowhere near quietly enough for me not to hear it. “It didn’t count. No. Of course not. I can’t even see her eyes. Surely, staring into those _hideous, insect-like-_ ”  
  
“I can hear you whining from here. Real classy, _Weiss_ ,” I cut her off right there, my tone sickeningly sweet. Dissing my completely functional fashion sense just wasn’t done. Bitch was just jealous she didn’t have _pockets_... Cargo pants forever, no regrets. “You’re my partner now, princess, and I’m yours. I’m not all that happy about it either, but you don’t see me denying reality.”  
  
I inhaled, deeply, as I forcefully switched off the igniters in my gauntlets and pointedly _didn’t set her on fire_. “Stop acting like a _child_ and let's get ‘er done.” I turned my back, the bigger woman in all ways that counted… Poor thing was flat as a board. Also, the last word was the best word. “You’re going the wrong way too, just so you know. Good luck with that.”  
  
Weiss paused, mid-bramble patch. I hoped it itched. “Y-you don’t know that!”  
  
“You don’t either!” I sang back and kept on walking.  
  
The high growl and stomp on the ground as I made some distance was ignored. The bustle of her skirts getting louder at the thirteen-second mark as she started following after me, not so much.  
  
Weiss had no other options here. Simple as that.  
  
She had no idea where she was going. I ‘knew’ better than her and that was enough for her to suck it up and fall in line…for now. Weiss was probably just waiting for the right time to tell me I was wrong or something. Her trying to take command at some point was expected.  
  
**_Try_ was the operative word here. Fortune favored the bold, people...and, boy, was I **_BOLD_**.**


	4. Chapter 4

  
“You do know what Hunters do for a living, right?”  
  
Weiss - stuttered. Her step skipped a tiny beat, the grass under her feet swishing instead of crunching as a simple attempt at conversation threw her off her game. “Of course I do! What sort of question is that? I am here, aren’t I?”  
  
“Eh, true enough.” I yawned, my jaw stretching so wide that it ended up popping with a pair of audible cracks. It was only now becoming ten. I, now, hated everything slightly less. Good for everything, I guess. “Whatever prep school that Atlas has thought you were good enough to risk your life on the front lines, so I assume you passed the written exams. Good job. Gold Star. Too bad they never taught you about how to choose your all-terrain clothing because, honey, heels ain’t it.”  
  
I didn’t _care_ that her specific variation of heels didn’t have points on them. Weiss was essentially walking around on her toes, constantly. Seeing as we were in the woods right now and our appointed prey didn’t exactly spend their time hanging out on totally flat, man-made concrete… This girl was just fucking asking for a rolled ankle and the sort of foot problems you only saw in ballet dancers.  
  
Have you ever seen their feet? Pictures at the least? That was the stuff that horror stories were made of.  
  
If it weren’t for my sister being one of those fools that thought that wearing a combat skirt was the height of Grimm killing fashion, I’d be all over that too. But, seeing as criticizing Weiss would be criticizing my sister, (I do that to her face or not at all) I was going to keep that to myself. Two small pockets at the base, barely any protection against environmental hazards, and no instant bandages on the go without exposing yourself. Fucking genius was what that was.  
  
If it hadn’t been for Ruby giving in enough to get two thigh pouches for first aid and ammo, I’d be bugging her about it still. Screw it though. That wasn’t important. I was talking smack to Weiss while being helpful at the same time. Pragmatizing the shit out of my stubborn little sister was a long and painful process that wasn’t going to be solved in the here and now. My entirely legitimate complaints could wait for a while longer.  
  
I’d got my partner’s dander up, and she thought she’d as good as had me over a barrel. I knew her type. That’s how they _always_ were.  
  
“What would you know about style or utility?” The heiress scoffed, her stupidly expensive platform soles somehow avoiding slipping on the dewy grass or skidding in the dirt. “I’ll have you know that _my_ clothing is perfectly adequate to the task of hunting. More than adequate! In fact,” she slowed down, allowing the words that next came out of her mouth to roll off the tongue. Any slower, and she’d be tasting them. “ **They’re Fibonacci originals**.”  
  
I had to sigh. Loudly. If she was expecting me to look at her in awe after that particular name drop, she was about to be sorely disappointed… I had no fucking clue who that was. Neither did the birds, which explained why the world hadn’t gone silent at her proclamation. Shocker. “So?”  
  
“So? _So_!?” The white-haired girl let out a gasp, the irritated exasperation in it entirely serious as she hurried to close the five-foot gap between us and get in my face. The girl had no chill. Zero. “He’s the single greatest designer of functional high society wear on all of Remnant! How can you _not_ know who he is?”  
  
“Oh. Dunno. Guess I’ve been living under a rock. That’s nice though.” I lengthen my stride some, and Weiss finds her chase a lot harder than she thought it was going to be. Five foot nothing, 0. Five foot ten, 1. Scratch that onto a fucking chalkboard, why don’t you? “I’ll make sure to give them a call the next time I have myself a tea party in the Grimmlands. The Wicked Witch of the West will be so jealous of my connections and seasonally themed haute couture.”  
  
“As if you could hope to afford him,” Weiss seethed… Also, classism, much? She didn't know shit about what I could or could not afford... Well, neither did anyone that wasn't my Dad, but still. Rude. “But, I must admit that I am surprised.”  
  
“‘Bout what?”  
  
“That you have a vocabulary that isn’t made up entirely of grunts and rude bodily noises. Astounding.”  
  
**_This bitch_.**  
  
“You’d be surprised,” I grumbled back, still the bigger woman as always, before I came to an abrupt stop to yawn again. That Weiss didn’t run into my back, from what I heard of her frantic backpedaling and cursing, was only due to some effort on her part. Poor thing. “And you’re really making this peaceful coexistence thing hard, you know that? ... I suppose that I can burp in your face every once in a while though, if that’s what you want. From what I understand, some people don’t do very well when their perceptions of reality are challenged. I don’t want to make you uncomfortable or anything.”  
  
The disgust being thrown at my back didn’t have to be seen. I could feel it. Sense it, like a dot of heat in between my shoulder blades that was Weiss’s way of trying to light me on fire… The joke was on her though. I was fucking _fireproof_. Lava didn’t have shit on me. “My opinion of you falls lower with every word out of your mouth.”  
  
Same, babe. Same and right back at you… God _damn_ was this year going to suck… I couldn’t back down from this confrontation now though. The glove had been thrown down, and girl combat was in motion. Dropping down to Defcon four. We could make up later over a tub of ice cream or something.  
  
“Hey, now. I was just trying to show you some Valean hospitality. Sorry that my attempt at allowing you your illusions and conforming to Atlesian customs offended you, princess. Would coughing on your food make you feel better? Some spit in your soup?”  
  
Weiss, instead of saying something comprehensible, made a sound like a tea kettle that had been left on the stove for too long. That she didn’t start clawing at my hair while shrieking really showed the difference in breeding between us...but, meh. She broke first. Winner winner, where the fuck is my belt at?  
  
I could sense the hands reaching for my neck when, with one last set of steps forward, we broke into a clearing. Right out into the open and a scooby doo-esque chase scene as done by a giant bone scorpion, a two-headed snake, a pissed off secret catgirl, and a blonde boy with a possible future in the opera as a soprano… Which reminded me. Time to de-escalate.  
  
We had bigger problems.  
  
“Oh, hey! Look! Witnesses! I mean, fellow Hunters in trouble!” I declared loudly, my voice somewhat high as I forcefully brought Weiss’s crime of passion to a sudden halt. “Let us away, bestest friend, and give them our aid!”  
  
“Damn you!” Weiss howled, her eyes wild as she whipped out her rapier and, with some momentary wavering of the point of it between me and the Grimm, she focused on the Grimm. “Damn you to hell!”  
  
“Love you too, Weiss-cream!”  
  
The unholy screech that slipped past her lips at that could only be experienced, never described. No words could do it justice… And that was how we both got to live another day without gutting each other. Focusing on a common enemy. This was what brought in the results...as well as a complete lack of the capacity required to feel shame in social situations.  
  
If it _looked_ like confidence, didn’t it mean that it was, indeed, confidence? Think about it. Let it come to you. Be one with the universe and be free. Be the butterfly you always knew you could be...and fuck the bee. The bee only ever hit once. That was fucking lame. Be the wasp. The fucking _wasp._  
  
When the black end of the Taijitu made to have yet another go at a scruffy blonde lunch, I was there to meet it from the side with a flying leap. Fist cocked back, flames slipping through the gaps of my teeth in trailing embers that I spat in its eye; Hot ash. Caustic oil. Permanent blinding turned into a maiming as my metal studded knuckles finished the job, crushing the eye socket and popping that giant red orb like an evil, steaming balloon as it went in deep.  
  
I stuck my hand in up to the elbow, my hold as good as assured on the inside bones of its skull as it started whipping its half of the body about in pain and rage...and, more than likely, panic as it felt its end coming at it. War primed. Systems green. Pressure stable as I poured a stream of fiery death juice (™) right into the empty cavity that had once held whatever Grimm had in place of a brain.  
  
If experience told me anything, whatever brainmeats analog in there was ready to go fuel. So, empty. Or as good as.  
  
The other eye, its only good one on this end of the body, blew straight out. Was instantly vaporized by a mix of the mundane and the fantastic. Gasoline and styrofoam. Fire and lightning. A touch of my Semblance and we had Napalm on Bath Salts and Krokodil that, as the excess ran down the Taijitu’s neck, popped. Crackled. Burst out from between the gaps in its flesh; pressure forcing them open with a shrill whistle as its skin and scales began to melt and run like shitty, dollar store candle wax.  
  
The white end, who’d been opportunistically snapping at Weiss and (Black?) her new battle-buddy whenever the scorpion was busy with either of them, only realized that something was wrong when the rot crept onto its end; Charcoal. Fifth-degree burns and worse. A weeping, bubbling red that ended in a way that, I admit, I didn’t expect.  
  
I kicked off, the feeling of the corpse’s neck under my boots unpleasantly squishy, just before it fell. Collapsed under its own weight and snapped off from the rest of the body like a piece of dry wood, turning its counterpart into a shrieking, confused, and flopping mess... It was good as neutralized now, the only dangerous part of it being its heft and agonized, random flailing while its life slowly came to an end.  
  
In other words, I’d turned it into an easy dodge and handle for anyone with actual training.  
  
Jaune shrieked like a little girl, the only thing saving him from broken bones or worse being his upraised shield as he was blown off his feet and out of sight by the end of the Taijitu’s impromptu tail... Seeing that I could hear his moans coming out of a nearby bush though, I tentatively labeled him as ‘okay’ and put him out of mind.  
  
Never settle for second best, folks. No one ever got a trophy for being the fucking bee… Also, thank _god_ that Grimm blood flaked off like everything else did when these bastards died. I’d have never got it out otherwise. Just saying… And remember kids! It's not a war crime, or a crime at all if the enemy literally doesn't have a soul! The more you know, reading rainbow!  
  
“What in the name of all that’s good and holy in the world was _that_!?” Weiss, her tone having made a 90 degree turn away from hostile and towards the sort of respect you gave a crocodile that was sharing the river you were in, politely asked. “Was that **_Dust_**!?”  
  
Me, being me, and knowing exactly who I was talking to and what it could mean if I said ‘yes’, instantly went for the smart option. Lying. Totally shameless untruths. Getting sued by her dad over this sounded like a bitch. “Eh. No. Dust doesn’t do that. That was just my Semblance!”  
  
“YOUR SEMBLANCE...!? ** _Liar!_** ”  
  
Well. I wasn’t expecting to get called out so soon. Thankfully for me though, we still had a giant bone scorpion running around and doing its thing. You know. Bashing down trees. Waving its pincers about. Repeatedly and uselessly stabbing the ground with its glow in the dark tail as its targets glyphed away and turned into shadows. The usual.  
  
It looked like this situation called for a hero! … And, when a quick look at my wrist told me that I had another three of those shots left, I came to the simplest possible conclusion as to who that hero could be.  
  
“Stand back, girls! And guy! Danger close! Make sure not to inhale too deep and keep them peepers closed!” War clicked as an emptied canister was rotated into storage, then again as it automatically reloaded with a whir. “I’ve got this!”  
  
Weiss, having seen firsthand what I was warning her about, vacated the area as fast as was humanly possible. Off, off, and away into the woods like a bat out of hell that was looking to break my sister’s speed record.  
  
The other girl in this mess, Black or whatever, fell back to what _might_ have been a safe distance towards Jaune’s bush. Might, seeing as I’d never quite tested the range on this thing...and then, she did a double take. Had her eyes go _real_ wide as she took in the horrifically painful skeletonization of what had used to be a giant, two-headed snake, and made to widen that distance by at least twice that much with Jaune over her shoulder.  
  
Nice of her to care for her partner like that. Super cool...but the Deathstalker’s confusion only lasted for so long before it turned to me. Big mistake.  
  
“WA-CHA!”  
  
A mistake that led to it getting hosed in the face by the single greatest flammable material on Remnant… A bright orange this time. Pretty...and it wants to know your location. Hot single fires looking for dates. Dial this number now for cheap succ.  
  
“How do you like that, motherfucker!? HUH!?” I roared as the damn thing reared back on its legs and started smacking at its head with its claws. That it only helped the fire spread was, no doubt, a terrible surprise. “HOW DO YOU LIKE ME NOW!”  
  
The Deathstalker, after some mad chittering, fell back onto its many feet and proceeded to show me exactly how it felt about me in the most direct way possible.  
  
“OH, SHIT!”  
  
By charging at a, now running, me, and setting everything near it on fire as well… Once I think about it, seeing as this was a fucking huge forest and there was wood everywhere, I might have just made a bit of an oopsie.  
  
==========  
  
“Here we are! All safe and sound and living!” I helpfully declared with highly deserved cheer; the end of the forest leading to the edge of a gorge a wonderful sign as to us having reached our destination...as were the ruins ahead and to the right of us where we would, assumedly, find the relics we’d been ordered to gather. Sweet. “Isn’t it just a _wonderful_ day?”  
  
Compared to the chance to hit the sack as soon as we got back, several deep breaths of non-smoke laced air was a minor pleasure. We’d lost the Deathstalker a while ago, who had probably been cooked alive in its own shell by now, so I thought it was warranted.  
  
How many people at my age could say that they’d killed an ancient Deathstalker with a flamethrower? Not many, I assume.  
  
“Hate. So much hate,” Weiss, always so negative, said from behind me between pants of exertion and coughing… So much for her all-terrain heels, even if she’d managed to keep up. I wouldn’t want to be her when those suckers came off, lord no. Also, she was _definitely_ regretting wearing all white. Ashes were a bitch to get out of clothes at the best of times as it was and, right now, she looked more black than gray. They were ruined. RUINED. “The day you expire will be a day where the world becomes a touch brighter.”  
  
“... Wow. Damn, Weiss. You’re kind of bringing down the mood here. Dark much?”  
  
“I agree with Snow Angel…” Blonde number two muttered from over Blake’s (I’d learned it along the way) shoulder. That she then dropped him like a sack of potatoes, bruised ribs and all now that we were away from the fire and he had the breath to talk, should have been expected. Clearly though, from his pained groan and his rolling about, he hadn’t expected it. “W-why did I think that coming here was a good idea again?”  
  
Good question.  
  
“Because we’re all idiots who thought that dying alone and far away from our families and friends would be a good career move, duh!” Reaching down, I pulled the boy up and onto his feet. “Welcome to Hunting, the one profession on Remnant where there is no retirement plan that doesn’t involve being crippled for life!”  
  
Better answer.  
  
Jaune’s already pale complexion turned a shade paler. “O-oh. Right. That’s right.” He let out a choked laugh as I gave him a double pat to the shoulders and let him stand on his own. “Hunting is like that. Of course. I knew that. Already. I knew that already.” He laughed again, a sputtering cough. “Thank you for reminding me.”  
  
“No problem. If you need any more grim reminders of your horrible and inevitable death while in the dark and terrified, let me know!”  
  
Revenge was sweet.  
  
“Why would you say that, you fool?” Weiss coughed, her breath whistling unhealthily with each one she took as she took her hands off her knees. If anything said just how tired she was, it was her entirely ignoring ‘Snow Angel’. God, what was he, five? “What is _wrong_ with you!?”  
  
“Uh, I dunno. Maybe I just thought he needed a reality check? Ever hear of those? A lot more of us would live out the rest of our school years if we got them more often.”  
  
That wasn’t just me saying that. I’d seen the charts. Much like driving, Hunting involved a lot of teen deaths for much the same reasons. Overconfidence and alcohol or, hell, both those things combined, were very real dangers to our continued existence. Aura didn’t make you invincible, people. Stop acting like it. No one lives forever.  
  
“Also, do you want a list of all my issues?” I continued cheerily. “I don’t have any paper on me at the moment, but I’ll be glad to hand you a copy when we get back to the school.”  
  
Honestly, one through fifty was just going to be the number of outfits that I couldn’t wear in polite company due to my massive girl cock. Seeing as exhibitionism, or getting on the sex offender list wasn’t one of my kinks, that was kind of a giant downer.  
  
I couldn’t even wear them in impolite company, for that matter. I’d had Neo laugh at me more times than I could remember while trying to fit myself into a fucking _skirt_. Of course, all the lewd faces and gestures she made while I was in the middle of fitting myself into said skirt didn’t help in the slightest… For obvious reasons. They didn’t really need explaining, but fuck it.  
  
Massive girl cock, man. That’s a big part of the reason why I consistently wore pants and carried duct tape. Can’t really do much else, can I?  
  
“These are the next four years of my life,” Weiss wheezed cutely, venting her bad case of existential dread all over us as we all power walked ourselves closer to cold and unburnable stone… They couldn’t judge me for using my Semblance how it was meant to be used, right? The bullheads with the water tanks should be appearing aaaaaaaaannnny second now. “Four years of blonde idiots, unholy fires and obscene brutality as done by head idiot number one… What did I do to deserve this?”  
  
“I don’t know,” Blake spoke up, all dry wit and unconventional charm while her bow smoldered lightly at the top of her head. Wherever she went smoke followed her and, if she noticed, she gave no sign as she pocketed a piece...somewhere. If she had pockets, I wasn’t seeing them. “Does ‘unethical business practices’ ring a bell? Wage slavery maybe? You must have heard about the SDC’s multi-Kingdom monopoly, pulled together through blackmail and intimidation, surely?”  
  
“... You as well?” Weiss asked slowly. “Of course. Of course, you as well. Why should I have expected anything else but enemies at every turn?” Her fingers curled tight around the hilt of her rapier, as ready to draw as I’d ever seen her. “Wherever I go, there I am.”  
  
… Yeaaaah… It might be time to pull back before she did something we’d all regret.  
  
“Well, I don’t know about Blake here, but I don’t hate you. Hell, I’m not even your actual enemy. I just have a chip on my shoulder, a shit relationship with early morning activities, and a defective brain-to-mouth filter.” Keeping her at the corner of my eye the entire time, I plucked the white knight piece off its stand at random and slid it into my jacket. Mission accomplished. “I’m sure that, after we get to know each other better, we’ll be the best of pals.”  
  
“You know, I never thought I’d say this to anyone in my life and mean it,“ Weiss said after a long silence as we tentatively walked back to the forest, to the farthest spot _away_ from the roaring bonfire that the Deathstalker had created. I’d been nowhere near it when it happened, I swear. “But if living or dying depended on talking to you for any real length of time - I think I’d rather die.”  
  
As if the universe had heard her, which it very well might have, seeing as the Gods were very real, it made to oblige her request; In its own way. Unknowable. Random… With my sister zipping out of the woods, arms waving madly and screaming with a trio of other Hunters (one of them being Nora) doing much the same right behind her… The words that came out of her mouth at this time were in no way reassuring as to the perversity of the universe not looking to bite Weiss in the rear.  
  
**“SCATTER! RUN! FLY, YOU FOOLS!** ”  
  
The Deathstalker that I’d written off for dead all of five minutes ago burst through the treeline, and a tree, as a roaring pyre. A giant ball of flame and insectoid hate that was too fucking stubborn to die, even when it should… And it totally should. If it still had eyes I couldn’t see them. Any chittering noises that came from it couldn’t be heard over the crackle of the flames...but none of us needed those things to know what was _really_ important here.  
  
“ **IT'S ANGRY! SUPER ANGRY!** ”  
  
Just like the proverbial ninja when dealing with its prey, it was really fucking _hard_ to catch something that was on fire. Not for me, seeing as I was a much higher grade of proverbial ninja, but everyone else…? Yeah. We might have problems.  
  
Accidental manslaughter wasn’t something I wanted on my resume for some odd reason.  
  
“ **DAMN IT, YANG! WHAT DID YOU DO!?** ”  
  
“Firing line! Blast the hell out of it with everything you’ve got!” I cried out, avoiding Ruby’s silly and irrelevant questioning by jumping straight towards handling the problem entirely. Really, my sister and her priorities... “It's on its last legs and it just needs a push!”  
  
Now, normally, this wouldn’t have worked at all. I knew that. I wasn’t so dense as to not notice that Blake and Weiss hadn’t been able to put a dent in the fucking thing, even while working together. That Grimm had had plants growing on its shell, instantly labeling it as ‘so old that it was a major part of the landscape’. That instantly made it something that older Hunters should have been handling, instead of newbies like us. Normally, this would be a nightmare scenario. The sort of thing that was accompanied by words like ‘we regret to inform you’ and ‘closed casket’.  
  
This wasn’t normal though. Not even close.  
  
For starters, I’d lit it up with some of my personal patented ‘Trial at the Hague’ sauce...and it had _stayed_ lit up for over ten minutes now. To say that this particular mix was highly corrosive hellfire was like saying that my Uncle was a bit of a lush. You had to look pretty closely and be used to making out shapes in chemical fires, but I could _tell_ that the Deathstalker wasn’t as big as it used to be.  
  
As it ran towards us, stumbling about on seven out of eight legs, its stinger fell off. Right off. It didn’t even hit the ground before the wind of its owner’s passing turned it to ash.  
  
… Or, maybe not. The degradation was pretty visible at this point. You didn't need to be a hawk to see this. It had to have been dropping parts of itself all over the place, getting smaller and smaller as its carapace was used up in the single worst chemical reaction since FOOF came into existence. The only reason this fucker was still alive was due to spite. Spite, and an all-consuming hatred of sentient life that had it running towards its death without a care.  
  
As long as it got one of us as it died, it would think it was an even trade.  
  
“Blow him to hell! Send that sonofabitch back to the Grimmlands!”  
  
Thanks to me being so kind as to give everyone some direction before my sister’s scaremongering could scatter them to the winds in terrified groups, we all proceeded to do so. Blake and Weiss hesitated only for as long as it took to see that the hail of rounds and grenades (I had to forcefully suppress the explosion of embers and leak Aura, just so that everyone around me stayed alive every time Nora let one off, but I didn’t have the heart to tell her to stop) were _doing something_ to join in.  
  
Jaune, as expected, proceeded to cower behind his shield while this went on… Getting him a pistol or something wouldn’t be a bad idea. This was just embarrassing… Ah, well.  
  
“AIM FOR ITS LEGS! FOR THE JOINTS!” Jaune added his voice to the unending explosions of everyone else. “CRIPPLE THEM AND WE CAN JUST LET IT BURN!”  
  
Oh, hey! We found a place for you, Jaune! Morale support and tactical advice! Good job! Still, you need a gun though. Just saying.  
  
The, still somewhat intimidating, hateful mass of soulless evil was whittled down with all the respect that was given to a plaster statue by a horde of neighborhood kids with potato guns… That had all been double dog dared to do as much as much damage as possible with a month’s supply of candy on the line. Which, it is to say, none at all.  
  
There was more than a little sadistic glee involved here, I’ll admit it.  
  
The legs, much like Jaune had said, were the first to go as every third round plinked off one of those blurring limbs. With a shattering noise like that of porcelain striking concrete; a fancy vase on linoleum, it nearly fell. Forced the rest of its legs under it and came at us at a stilted power walk that was equivalent to a human sprint in terms of speed… Then, as it came within the last twenty feet of us, it fell onto its stomach at a slide.  
  
A good fifteen feet, nothing more than leftover inertia with only five feet to go...and it never got to the finishing line, thanks to the rifle round that had just ventilated its skull and came out the other end.  
  
“Go team Yang Bang!” I instantly threw my hands up in the air with a cheer, ignoring how Weiss was trying to drag me down to her level so that she could wrap her hands around my throat now that we no longer had a common enemy. I wished her luck. “I’m so proud of you all!”  
  
Then, just as the celebrations began with greatly varying levels of enthusiasm spread out among the participants, was when the wind turned...and the still burning corpse flakes of the Deathstalker began to waft towards us.  
  
Shit.  
  
“ **SCATTER!** ”


	5. Chapter 5

“And for collecting the knight pieces,” Ozpin droned, the glassy look in his eyes saying a great deal about just how much he’d like having the chance to rest. To go back into whatever closet this school put their teachers in when they weren’t in use so that he could recharge and forget about his, and his colleagues’, firefighting efforts.  
  
Understandable. I got what he was going for. Really.  
  
We’d left the forest just before noon. It was now three. Do the math… Damn Ancient Deathstalkers, being too damn smart for their own good. How it had figured out how to mix Dust, no one could say. Such a tragedy. Good thing we’d cut it down before it was too late and it started bombing folks, eh?  
  
That was my story and I was sticking to it. Winners wrote the history books, so bleh.  
  
“Jaune Arc, Weiss Schnee, Blake Belladonna, and Yang Xiao-Long,” Ozpin continued after some silence and a slow sip from his mug… Then another sip, longer than the first as everyone looked quietly on... If there wasn’t a shot of whiskey in that Black Death coffee, I’d eat my boxers. The fumes wafting off of him reminded me of home. “As Team Juneberry, lead by Jaune Arc. Good day.”  
  
And, with that, as he left the stage at a careful walk, was when I let out a cheer. That the rest of my team just groaned at me and began a slow trudge off the stage didn’t dissuade me at all. “Go Team Yang Bang!”  
  
What kind of name was _Juneberry_ , really? Lame. So lame... So, fuck it. If the teachers could cheat, so could I. Swap some letters around, slap in last names when appropriate, and entirely replace letters that didn’t fit with other letters and you had Yang. Or Bang. One or...if you squinted.  
  
I was young and invincible and had the whole world in front of me. I did what I wanted.  
  
“Shut up, Xiao-Long!” Weiss hissed at me like a pissed off cat. Ironic, considering the Faunus walking at her back and looking to stick a knife in it. “That is _not_ becoming a thing!”  
  
“Of course not. Perish the thought.” I’d have the school referring to the team as Yang Bang by the end of the semester at the earliest. Believe it. By the time she figured it out, it would be too late. Teenagers and the rumor mill, man. What could you do? “Whatever you say, honeybunch.”  
  
I was in a good mood, just in case you couldn’t tell. Totally irrepressible. That I hadn’t been named the team leader was disappointing, yeah, but kind of expected considering what had happened. I’d nearly burnt down Beacon’s primary training center and initiation grounds. Me still being here and not in the remains of a crispy straightjacket while getting dog-piled by the teachers was a miracle… Or nepotism. Mostly nepotism.  
  
Yeah. It was, most likely, entirely nepotism.  
  
Last I remembered, Uncle Qrow was Headmaster Ozzy’s prime muscle and errand boy. My sister had one of the only pairs of silver eyes in existence or something. My mom had gone out on one of his asinine missions, then _died_ , traumatizing my dad and the rest of my family (including me) for life.  
  
Him entirely alienating all three members of the only family I knew of that actually counted over something as small as some friendly arson sounded dumb. He was playing the long game here and, really, my little mistake didn’t even compare to how much of a fuck up I’d have to be before he cut ties.  
  
… What? I could be serious if I wanted to be. I just, you know...didn’t do it much. Shut up.  
  
Anyway, thanks to what I’d done in a moment of youthful exuberance, Jaune had defaulted into being the only possible leader our team could have had. That the teachers could have allowed to run this group of misfits and crazies.  
  
I know, shocker, but let me explain before you start talking shit, my non-existent audience.  
  
Exhibit A. Weiss Schnee. A stuck up, whiny bitch that had, near the entire time we’d been in the forest, been following so close at my heels she’d almost stepped on them while playing the class card. The ‘wait till my father hears about this’ card. Like a follower. As in, not leader material.  
  
We’d have to work on that girl some... Sorry, Neo. I’d be buying that deluxe bowl earlier than planned. This was an emergency if I’d ever seen one and, if life had ever taught me anything, it was that ice cream and romcoms could fix the world.  
  
… Moving on. Exhibit B. Blake Belladonna. She was...herself. Quiet, standoffish, and a former terrorist… I think? Pretty sure she was Fang. Recent Fang even and pretty high up. Deprogramming from that was going to take some time, and putting her in a position of command over some ‘grunts’ probably wouldn’t help… Also, she just didn’t seem interested in anything besides reading and making snarky comments when appropriate.  
  
I could sympathize, and appreciate that, but this was a four man band. Not a threesome with an emotionally adjacent cat girl and her disturbingly large porn collection on the sidelines.  
  
And, then, there was Exhibit C! Me. The best and brightest, by all meanings of the word, Hunter on the team...and the textbook definition of ‘Hot Mess’. The hottest mess. That one that shared space with words like ‘Why is the water burning’ and ‘It burns the flesh but does not consume’. Good times all around...but not the sort of good times that you wanted in your heroes of tomorrow.  
  
I was stretching the Hunter PR machine to the max as it was. Making me the face of our little group, then expecting everything to go well on our first mission out into the Valean wilderness, would be fucking stupid.  
  
So, in the end, that left Exhibit D. The incompetent scaredy cat that gave out decent tactical advice while under duress… A surprising amount of duress. Like, I knew that thing was going to die even if we hadn’t helped it along at the end. We could have just dodged it for a while until it was nothing but cinders...but Jaune hadn’t known that. Hell, he hadn’t even had his Aura unlocked more than an hour ago. That he’d stood his ground and _tried_ to help at all said something about how willing he was to be a soldier in the longest war known to Man and Faunus.  
  
I mean, it was only a giant ancient Deathstalker from before the four kingdoms that was screaming towards him while on fire. It’s not like it was anything serious… Yeah. That’s why he got the job. He was the most sane of the four of us, not that it said all that much...poor bastard. Ozpin expected him to be able to run herd on us? Good fucking luck.  
  
Also, speaking of poor bastards…  
  
I sidled up to my sister, as was my wont, and caught her in a crushing side hug. “Rubes! Friend! Sister! Pal! Sibling! Comrade!”  
  
“Yaaaaaaaaaaang!” Ruby moaned the moan of a dying animal, her struggles against my iron hold weak and useless. She should have expected this. She really should have. “Nooooooooo!”  
  
“Leader of your own team! At the tender age of fifteen and change! What a start! What a beginning!” My other arm, the one that wasn’t busy keeping her captive, extended outwards and up. Two fingers out and pointing towards a glorious, figurative future… The looks of uncertainty on the rest of her team’s faces; invincible girl’s and emotionless man’s, and the one of unrestrained amusement on crazy ginger’s, said that no help was coming. “Your star burns bright!” I started wiggling my fingers, evoking the twinkling of stars and burning comets. “A new age of heroes dawns this day!”  
  
Ruby’s struggles at this proclamation actually made me tense my arm a bit...but she was doomed. Doomed from the start. If I could keep a grip on Neo that lasted for more than thirty seconds while she was trying to break my arm or stab me in the foot, I could hold onto Ruby for an eternity.  
  
… That sounded kinda bad, once I thought about it. Eh, whatever. My relationship with Neo was super complicated, alright? Complicated, as in I might deserve the stabbings I get every once in a while. I could be sort of a dick at times...and Aura made forgiving a friendly stabbing pretty easy.  
  
“Shame about the horrible name though, but I guess the hero can’t have everything,” I said, my grin growing wider as Ruby resorted to biting at my forearm like a desperate coyote to escape my grip. She wasn’t getting through the leather of my jacket, not with the metal mesh I had custom ordered into it, but it was a good try. “If you didn’t have something to struggle against from the start, there wouldn’t be much point, eh?”  
  
“... What’s wrong with RVNN?” Pyrrha (Of _course_ I knew who she was.), one of my sister’s new underlings, distracted me from Ruby’s imitation of Zwei attacking a bone with a question and a frown. “I think it sounds wonderful.”  
  
Girl, I've seen your PR files. You think _everything_ sounds wonderful.  
  
“Welllllll,” I drew out the word some, just to build up suspense some. Some. “That is a long and painful story, stretching all the way back to the trauma that was my birth,” I began in a serious voice, framed by the adorable gnashing of Aura protected teeth on Beowulf proof leather and chain. “One that focuses on a morally deficient, mentally handicapped, emotionally stunted old hag that left her loving family to shit in the woods and kill random passersby.”  
  
Pyrrha blinked, visibly reticent to continue this conversation. Ruby’s flapping of her hands, waving in a clear ‘no’, just finished any curiosity she might have had on following this particular line of questioning herself. “Oh. That - sounds like a story.”  
  
“It really is. We can continue it as soon as I get access to a fireplace, a pipe, and a poofy chair, if you want?”  
  
“No, no…” The redhead laughed it off nervously while Ren and, funnily enough, _Nora_ started looking a bit worried. I had no idea why. It wasn’t like I was bitter or anything. “That’s alright.”  
  
“There’ll be snacks?” I offered… And, for a second, it looked like Nora might have accepted it. Just a second. A shake of the head from Ren killed that hope before it even began. “Fine. Spoilsports. Maybe I’ll be able to lay it on a much more receptive-” I looked around and realized that my team, being my team, had left me behind. Team Yang Bang was off to a great start. “Guess not.”  
  
“They left about three minutes ago,” Ren added helpfully with a pointed finger down the hall. “I believe that they were looking forward to unpacking and a shower.”  
  
“Ah. Thank you. That makes sense.” I nodded and went along with it. “I need a shower too, once I think about it. We all do. Wood smoke and Grimm stink is hell to get out of hair.”  
  
One and all, even Ruby, we all groaned at the thought of it. Longish hair, or just volume, being a thing we all shared, this was something that we all bonded over and sympathized with in some way… I really hoped that the hot water here was better than at home because, if it wasn’t, there was going to be a really pissed off dorm floor in each of our respective futures.  
  
Ah, well. At least I’d found people to bitch with over mutual problems. The first step towards friendship.  
  
“Anyone willing to take bets on whether Weiss has crushed my leader’s spirit yet?” I hummed, taking that question that I’d just asked entirely seriously. “I don’t know him all that well, but he seems pretty nice. _Too nice._ No backbone at all.” I flipped open my scroll and started following the beeping dot. “That’s just my opinion though. Yours?”  
  
“I like him,” Pyrrha asserted. “And there’s nothing wrong with being nice.”  
  
“Course not,” I acceded, “but being nice won’t help much if he doesn’t have the skills to back it up...and so far, I’m not impressed.”  
  
“... He _is_ sort of weedy.”  
  
Pyrrha looked at Nora like she’d just been stabbed.  
  
“Thank you, Nora. I’m glad I’m not the only that noticed.” I sighed and stopped in front of my door, Ruby having found one of the knives I’d stashed in my outfit at this point to start sawing at my elbow. Still couldn’t throw a punch to save her life, but damn if she wasn’t a great pickpocket. “I don’t know who trained him...” No one, if nothing had changed. “But they didn’t try very hard. Bringing him up to snuff is going to be a bitch.”  
  
“What he’s using is first-gen mechashift. 1.5 at the latest.” Ruby stopped cutting at my arm to give her well-regarded input. “I’m pretty good, but I’m not a miracle worker. That thing is a historical relic, about as modular as your average paperweight. Only way he’s getting any range in his repertoire is if we break that baby down and rebuild her from the ground up, he drops it entirely, or his Semblance turns out to be something that can kill at a distance.”  
  
“Nothing?”  
  
“I don’t think the school has a furnace hot enough to make any real changes. Nothing beyond cosmetics anyway,” Ruby admitted sullenly as she limply dangled from the crook of my arm. “The alloys involved have gone out of style, just because they were nowhere near moldable enough to allow for the versatility we have now… Good news though. That thing will be as sharp as it was when it was forged another ten generations down the line.”  
  
That was pretty cool...but, still. That boy had problems. Mainly in the firepower department, literal or figurative... He was a good kid. Problem was that we needed a good leader. Someone to follow when the going got rough.  
  
If he wanted to play sword and board, I was going to make damn _sure_ that he had the build for it, the skinny little shit. The gym was going to be his new home. Protein shakes his diet. If he wasn’t built like a beardless viking at the end of this, then my name wasn’t Yang Xiao ‘Bed Breaker’ Long.  
  
“... Fuck it.” I swiped my scroll across the lock, opening it with a click and a happy little beep… The soundproofing on these things was ridiculous. I hadn’t heard the yelling before the locks had gone up. “I guess I’m just going to have to get him a mag harness and a pistol then. Give him some kind of backup until I whip him into shape.”  
  
“It’s not magnetic though.”  
  
“Duct tape fixes all problems, Ruby.” Finally letting her go, I palmed my knife back without much issue and slid it into the seemingly entirely ornamental dragon head piece on my belt. “Also, it was nice talking to you guys. Thanks for indulging me as long as you had, even if it was just to follow your glorious leader into the dragon’s den.” I ruffled my sister’s hair one last time and took the swipe to the gut she gave me with all the good humor it was meant in. “Leave no man behind is something I can get behind.”  
  
“Of course. It’s not as if we could let her suffer alone.” Ren dryly commented, causing me to let out a bark of easy laughter. “That our room is right across the hall from yours just made an impossible choice possible.”  
  
Ren’s got jokes. Good on him.  
  
“Hold your team close, Ruby. Such sacrifice is not often seen in these dark days.” With a snap of the fingers and a heel to the door to force it open, I made my farewells with a toss of the hair and a singular warning. “If you don’t see me at breakfast in the morning, send help. I’ve probably been strangled to death and shoved into Weiss’s luggage as a framejob by Blake so that she can steal my bed.”  
  
“... Wait.” Ruby’s brow scrunched up in adorable confusion, leaving that the last sight of her in my memory before the door swung closed. “What in the who now with the what?”  
  
Quickly entering the room, I kicked the door shut before anyone could ask actual questions. Good thing too, seeing as I wasn’t entirely sure if I was joking. Team Yang Bang was stupidly dysfunctional. The scene that I’d just walked into made that clearer than ever.  
  
It was utter pandemonium. Chaos. Luggage scattered everywhere, furniture arranged into makeshift barricades… Jaune bonelessly slumped over an overturned bed with a pair of mismatched heel prints on either buttcheek... Poor kid. He’d never stood a chance.  
  
He was but an ant in the face of Titans...and he had been squished. Battered. Abused. Entirely broken before the magnifying glass that had come out to roast him for his sins against dorm room divinity.  
  
“I told you to back off, Schnee! I told you!” Blake roared, eyes wide and wild as she repeatedly swung her pillow at the other girl with a two-handed grip; each swing blew my hair back from my spot at the doorway, the quality of the _swooshing_ involved more than enough to call it ‘near-lethal’. “Don’t make me gut you like a fish, damn you!”  
  
Weiss, with a pillow of her own in one hand and a towel in the other, held her ground through finesse. By acting like a weary gladiator on their last fight against the lion before they were freed from their master’s stables…and being really sick of the Lion’s shit. “A fish? A _fish_!? I’ll turn you into a mince, cur! Into a cut of meat that I wouldn’t even feed to the dogs if you don’t remove yourself from my sight! That space is _mine_!”  
  
… Actually, I wasn’t even entirely sure that he’d gotten into this mess on purpose. There was a better than even chance that he’d just been in the wrong place at the wrong time when Blake and Weiss had started fighting over which part of the room belonged to whom… I’d seen something like this before. Nothing so extreme as this, but I’d seen this before.  
  
“Oh, hey.” I got right to the heart of the matter by shrugging off my jacket and moving to _my_ corner, leaving my upper half in nothing but webbing and a slightly musty black bodysuit as I typed my ID into my scroll. “They actually set up my traveling office. Sweet.”  
  
Sleepovers could get kinda...weird...when someone found out that this thing existed. A perfect cube, the modern modular pinnacle of home-on-the-go comfort and mechashifting science in a 24-by-18-by-12 inch box while unpacked. Highly experimental. **_Highly expensive_**...and worth every penny I’d spent on it.  
  
That was a lot of pennies, FYI. Loads. A couple warehouses worth or so. Not sure how many. Still worth it.  
  
If it hadn’t been one of the only ones of its kind, it would have been the luxury model. Lush, cream carpet. A double bed that you could mistake for a cloud. A mini-sofa set that I’d conked out on more than once...and a pure, if small, mahogany desk with an inlaid lap scroll to do my work on. All together, this thing was worth more than my dad’s entire house. If it hadn’t been for my actual _job_ , I’d have been shit out of luck.  
  
Good thing Hunting was just a sidegig, huh? My team clearly didn’t feel that way though. It was like a record had just exploded off of the DJ table in a hail of shrapnel when the transparent siding slid up at my approach... Forget that screeching shit. The bomb I’d just dropped on them deserved a more - measured response.  
  
Seeing as they weren’t even trying to kill each other anymore, preferring to stare at me instead as I settled in, they were trying to think up what that response should be right now. _This_ was why I’d fingered them as the culprits of my demise before it had even happened. You gotta think ahead, people. Play your life like it's a game of chess, then flip that shit right over as soon as things stop going your way.  
  
Bonus points if you started screaming crazy shit that you could never take back, Monopoly style. Keep em’ guessing.  
  
Anyway, life wasn’t a strategy game. Thinking that way was how you woke up in a tub full of ice and to a lipstick message on the bathroom mirror… Or, you know, without your fancy corner office that could fit into a cardboard box... Yes. Really. A cardboard box. One of those ones that you put all your clothes in when you were moving out. Those.  
  
Impossible you say? Madness you say? Now, hear me out. There was someone out there that could pull an entire minigun and its ammo out of a pocket purse. Any argument you might have had against the existence of such a marvel as this has now been rendered null and void. Suck it.  
  
“What?” They both forced out in stereo.  
  
Me being me, which was tired, I said nothing as I did a quick inspection of the goods... Ignoring that black spot on the carpet where I’d shook off my shirt after a weapon’s test, everything looked fine. I was going to have to put the coffee table over it, sure, but everything looked fine. Even the mini fridge was intact...and I could see the foldout fireplace over there, ready and waiting to make the whole room nice and toasty.  
  
Whoever was in charge of installing this sucker deserved their pay and more. Setting this baby up for the inside of a building was a bitch and a half.  
  
“You mean it’s not a part of the room!?” Weiss cried, her entire posture radiating confused horror as her towel and pillow fell to the ground. “That I fought for _nothing_!?”  
  
Blake said nothing at all. She just put her pillow over her face and, from what I could guess, started screaming. Quietly.  
  
“What? No. Why the hell would you think that?” I gave her an incredulous look from the side, the only thing missing from it being an ‘L’ on my forehead. “You really think a school dorm would shell out for something like this? I barely got this fucker in as it was. Modifying it so that it fit in a sixth of the room instead of a fourth damn near turned my wallet inside out.”  
  
I was going to miss the hot tub. So, so much… Neo would take good care of it though. Probably by sending me lewd photos of her with it at inappropriate times, sure, but she’d take care of it… Bitch… I’d have left it with my Dad if I could have, but that meant leaving it with Uncle Qrow as well.  
  
Next time I saw it, he’d have licked it to assert his ownership. Repeatedly. Asshole.  
  
“Now, I’m not going to be _that_ roommate. You guys can come over onto my side of the room whenever you’d like.” I came back to the moment by nudging the coffee table some, covering up that mark I’d noticed earlier. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. “But I’m not going to have either of you fighting over my stuff...or beating up Jaune whenever he gets in the way of something you want. You guys knocked him right the fuck out.”  
  
“I’m o-o-kay!”  
  
“Look at him!” I ignored him and his slight stutter in favor of pointing dramatically at him, the perfect example. That the two actually _swiveled_ to do so was wonderful. All according to plan. Mwahaha. “Totally unconscious! You know what you two did? Fucked up a perfectly good Huntsman in training is what you did! Now he’s got anxiety, you animals! Clean up this mess!”  
  
Jaune ended up being where I’d saw him last, unhealthy bend to his spine and all as our teammates fell to the force that was the disappointed voice of an older sister… Or just logic and cooled tempers prevailing. I dunno. What I _did_ know was that Jaune was, for being all of six feet tall, unnaturally light.  
  
What did he eat? What was his diet? Celery and lettuce leaves with a side of carrots, washed down by a bowl of Pumpkin Pete’s and candy floss? This shit just wasn’t going to fly.  
  
“Thanks, Yang…” Jaune let out a pained groan as, after getting him back on his feet, I flipped his bed back into place. “I was just - lost. I had no clue of what to do. Tried winging it, but-”  
  
“I saw. Also, yeah. I get it. I’m not judging you.” I interrupted him with a friendly pat on the shoulder, ready to give him back a dash of his dignity. “What you saw today wasn’t the sort of problem you could fix without experience or a real zinger behind you. Learn from this, my friend, and you’ll do better next time. Trust me.”  
  
“... Next time?”  
  
“Well, yeah. Of course there’s going to be a next time.” I raised a brow at him. “Have you never been around multiple girls that live in the same house? And see each other constantly? Bitchfests like this happen all the time. This one was just a little worse than normal.”  
  
When Jaune fell to his knees and raised his arms to the heavens with a wail of ‘It’s just like hooooome’, I knew that I’d got my point across… But damn it, Jaune. Don’t go throwing away the little dignity you still had like that. I just gave it to you.  
  
You’re kind of worrying me here, man. How are we supposed to rule the school and be super cool if you’re crying all the time? Quit it.


	6. Chapter 6

I’d come to realize as I’d aged, again, that sacrifices had to be made if you wanted things. Sacrifices from you, sacrifices from someone else. Sacrifices. Someone had to give something up to get something in return. That was the way life worked.  
  
For example. I’d sacrificed an hour of sleep and a thermos of coffee (still boiling as I pounded it down, as was the usual), on a school day, to do something that should have been done years ago… Jaune? Well, Jaune had just gotten super acquainted with that particular truth… Yesterday’s mess had sort of convinced me to teach it to him early.  
  
The Taijitu, the Deathstalker, the asskicking he got from the rest of our team. Take your pick and you’ve got a mess.  
  
He wasn’t all that happy about it, to be honest, but I was teaching now. What he felt about anything didn't matter in this case. Sucks to be him, I guess. Though, considering how I was giving him his _life_ here, validating his entire goddamn _existence_ , I had to say that my sacrifice was a lot worse than his was by far.  
  
I could be in bed right now, but noooooo.  
  
“Yeah. I was right.” I popped a squat right next to Jaune’s shuddering and broken body, elbows on my thighs and chin in my hands as I lamented my lack of a poking stick... What the hell was I going to poke him with if he expired? My hand? Hell no. That sounded unhygienic. Also, a lot like getting my prints all over the crime scene. No bueno. “You’ve convinced me.”  
  
There were sacrifices and then there was just being stupid. Better to keep one away from the other, for the betterment of all… All being me, to be clear. Jail sounded like it sucked, and not just because I’d be beating up the new fish every week or so to keep myself on top. That got tiring, you know?  
  
… Eh, screw it. I had nothing to worry about there. Back to business.  
  
“You’re never going to be an acrobat. Shame. You’ve got Aura in spades, sure, but all that’s going to do when you do a backflip is let you repeatedly mess up without killing yourself. We’re going to have to turn you into a wall, boss.”  
  
Little moving. Lots of soaking up damage and rolling with the blows while making yourself the best possible target. Perfect for him, really. All he had to do was scream like a little girl to draw all the attention and he had the role of tank in the bag... All with the bonus that was having less of a chance of an accidental crippling/manslaughter.  
  
I’d just watched this guy trip and land on his neck. Twice. At a roll. That was a level of incompetence I hadn’t even known existed before today… Live and learn, yeah? Also, oh boy was Aura some great stuff. Watching this kid break his own spine while dodging wasn’t my idea of a good time, I tell you what.  
  
“Whhhhhyyyyy?” He whined into the dirt, a tired mess. “What did I do to you, Yang? What did I _do_?”  
  
“Nothing,” I replied dryly back, the only sweat on me being his after a light punch had spun him around and knocked him flat on his ass, “and that’s the problem. Of course, if you’re planning on creating an entirely new form of martial art that relies on your face meeting someone else’s fists, you’re doing a pretty good job of it. I’m happy for you, really.”  
  
… Actually, with the amount of Aura he had, he might be able to get away with that… That would be hilarious. Let’s make it so. Get him a sturdy metal chin guard, a dentist who wouldn’t ask too many questions and enough milk to run a farm (strong bones were a necessity), and we’d be in business.  
  
Jaune twitched, the barbed arrows that was my critique striking him like physical blows… Ruby did much the same at times. I was now doubly amused. “T-take me to the nurse, please.”  
  
“Why do you need a nurse?”  
  
“I think I’m dying…”  
  
What a drama queen.  
  
“You’ve still got half your Aura left, you weenie. Trust me. This isn’t what dying feels like. Not even close. We just had ourselves a little early morning spar.” With a roll of the eyes, I stood up and toed him with the end of my boot some; a friendly tickling of the ribs until he flipped over and onto his back. Come on, man. Where’s your dignity? Get your face out of the dirt and pull it together, damn it. “Yeah. You aren’t going to be answering the ‘Riddle of Steel’ anytime soon. I can already tell.”  
  
Jaune rolled his head away from the sky to look at me, his face the very picture of confusion. “... The Riddle of _what_?”  
  
“True power, Jaune. The way a man, or woman, leaves their mark on the world,” I answered, the half-remembered contents of a movie from a lifetime ago rising to the front of my mind as I fiddled with the fit of my sparring gloves… Man, I remembered the most random shit, didn’t I? Not like I could just stop now though, seeing as I’d brought it up. Time to wing it. “What is it? Where does it come from?”  
  
“Apparently your fists,” He groaned out while he curled up in on himself in a weak attempt at sitting up. Weak, if only because he almost _failed_. I’d only hit him in the gut once...with the padded gloves even. We had a long way to go here. “You hit like a truck.”  
  
“Compliments, while appreciated, won’t save you from me, Arc.” I pursed my lips and cocked my head, Nora’s enthusiastic, far away battle cries just on the edge of my hearing as they echoed from another field.  
  
She understood what _really_ mattered in life. Ruby had found herself a good friend there...or, at least, a healthy one. Physically. Mentally was up in the air. Anyway, I was going to have to bring her in for this some time. It was only fair...and it might let me catch some extra shuteye on the benches while she tortured Jaune for me.  
  
Multitasking was important!  
  
“Or the path of the swole," I continued blithely as Jaune got onto his feet. "Also, that was the wrong answer. Bzzt. You’re not getting into Valhalla today, sucker. Enjoy Hela’s realm and getting your toenails turned into a boat.”  
  
“... What does that have to do with anything?”  
  
“Freedom of religion, Arc, that’s what.” It might not have been _my_ religion, but freedom of religion was totally important… Just keep it separated from the decisions of state and everything was great, in my opinion. “Freedom of speech and the freedom to express yourself in a public forum. Does that answer your question?”  
  
“Not really.”  
  
“Then I pity you.”  
  
Jaune paused at that, looked like he was about to say something rude for a second, then gave it up; swallowed up his questions with a sigh, and made pretty damn sure that the clumsy action that was him sheathing his sword went without incident… Which was the way it went, thankfully. I had no idea what I’d have done if something _had_ happened. Stand around awkwardly while he bled out, maybe. That would be a bit much for me to handle at my second day at school, just saying. “How much of the stuff that comes out of your mouth is serious? I can’t tell.”  
  
Man, for someone that had pretty much no talent or training, Jaune had a mouth on him. He had jokes. Chuckle titter laugh snort.  
  
“Oh? You can’t tell how serious I am, huh? I’m sorry. How’s about this then?” He had nowhere near the metaphorical cash to bank the checks his mouth kept writing. Until he did, I was going to come down on him like a ton of bricks...for his own good, of course. What? It wasn’t like I was hiding my own personal insecurities or anything through the use of passive-aggressive social violence. I was just trying to be helpful. “Give me three laps around the field then, smart ass. If you have enough air to make fun, you have enough air to run. Hup hup. How’s that for serious?”  
  
_“... Fuck.”_  
  
“Not anytime soon with an attitude like that, boyo.”  
  
==========  
  
Yang was having fun. Loads of it. Ruby could tell, not that it was hard for anyone to see. All it needed to tell was a look, if you knew her even a little bit… Yang was definitely having more fun than she normally did though, which was a distinct difference from the normal amounts of fun she derived from her daily silliness. Whether that was a good thing or not tended to change from one day to another… That Ruby wasn’t the focus of that mood for once was a relief. A sad, guilty relief.  
  
Her hair went unruffled. Her personal space, uninvaded… Ruby liked to look on the bright side of life.  
  
“Eat, eat, eat, eat!” Yang chanted maniacally, the sharp cut of her male uniform (it hadn’t been hard to get, once the Headmaster had heard the reasons for it) and the tight bun at the back of her head in direct opposition to...everything about her. The situation, the person, the atmosphere. Everything...and poor Jaune. Poor, poor Jaune was in the middle of it all… Better him than Ruby, was her motto. “Push it, force it, work it!”  
  
“Spin it, flick it, twist it!” Nora crowed, caught up in the whirlwind that was Yang’s wake without restraint, banging her fists on the table all the while. “Choke that sausage down! Show it who’s boss! Use your tongue more, darn it! You’re not even tasting it! This is supposed to be an _experience_!”  
  
“God damn _freshman_ ,” someone said from out of view...and, for once, Ruby had to agree.  
  
Gosh darn freshman indeed.  
  
“Guys, please,” Jaune mumbled plaintively around his gigantic mouthful of sausage and hard boiled egg, his face the dark red of befuddled shame that only Yang could bring. “Can you stop saying things like that? You’re making this really weird.”  
  
“Welcome to gym culture, nerd. If it ain’t homoerotic, it ain’t kosher.” Yang pulled a thermos out of her bag, one of many, the bright white strip around the middle declaring that it was one of her ‘safe’ concoctions… The ones that wouldn’t set you on fire, or blow you up, or melt the skin off your bones, or make you see things that weren’t there, or, or, or…something _terrible_ that Ruby couldn’t think of right then.  
  
Ruby loved Yang, and Yang loved her (Ruby knew that like she knew her baby), but she could be kinda scary.  
  
“Now suck down this thick, off-white, protein sludge-shake that I made for you before it gets cold and settles.”  
  
Just to repeat what had already been said, Yang could be kinda scary. Also, _gross_. Ruby was nowhere near dense enough for that joke to fly over her head, not at all.  
  
“ **Yang. Please.** ”  
  
“It's vanilla flavored,” Yang said in an off-hand manner, the grin on her face far too wide for her to be unaware of what she was doing to her leader… Who was starting to look like he was kinda shell shocked, actually. That was normal. Ruby would have been worried about him if he hadn't been. “If it isn’t all gone by the time breakfast is done, I’m going to be very disappointed in you.”  
  
Pyrrha, who had been here from the very start, before everyone else actually, looked torn. Like she wanted to intervene but also like she kinda...didn’t? Conflicted. Conflicted, was the word. She looked conflicted...and her face was even redder than Jaune’s if that was possible… It actually kind of hurt to look at directly, it was so bright. “A-are you starting a new regimen?”  
  
“Oh, yeah,” Yang answered for him. “Thunder thighs or bust, baby!”  
  
“... Isn’t that an insult?”  
  
When it came to Yang? No. Totally not. If Ruby’s sister had ever put her ego down in the last fifteen years of her life, Ruby had missed it entirely. That Yang was often capable of backing what she said _up_ , often with an explosion or five, just made it _worse_.  
  
“If you can crack rocks between them?” Yang’s hand whipped out without warning to crack against Nora’s waiting hand with a _boom_. Not a _slap_ , a _boom_. Gods, help your poor children. “Fuck no.”  
  
“Damn right.” Nora gave Ruby’s sister a sharp grin as the high five turned into a mutual hold and the gradual ticking of overstressed clothing.  
  
“Go big or go home.” Yang’s eyes lit up like one of her lab fires as she gave Ruby’s partner a nod.  
  
Ren, still as quiet as ever, looked pained as he rubbed at the back of his neck. Pained, and vaguely worried as he eyed the two girls who were currently, gleefully, trying to break each other’s hands… Ruby was doing much the same. The worry was real.  
  
“O-oh. I see.” Pyrrha cleared her throat and directed her attention to Jaune, her smile somewhat strained as the two of them started armwrestling...without their elbows touching the table. How did that even _work_? “I use a sword and shield myself, you know? If you ever need any help with your technique, I’d be more than willing to-”  
  
“Help him. Please,” Yang’s partner, Weiss, who had been entirely silent up to this point and looking angry about it, finally spoke up over her light breakfast of a lightly nibbled blueberry muffin and a glass of milk. “Give him advice. Tips. Anything you’re willing to give him, I’d greatly appreciate.”  
  
Blake, who, from what Ruby could see, was perfectly content to avoid dealing with this at all, continued to read. Ruby, who knew exactly _what_ she was reading (Beauties and the Beast: Volume Six: The Untitled One), was more than happy to let her.  
  
How _shameless_ did someone have to be to read that sort of thing in public? If it hadn’t been for Yang, Ruby would have called her a bad influence...but, well. **_Yang_**. Yang was as Yang did. **_Yang_**.  
  
“You hear that, Jaune?” Yang grunted, her eyes narrowed in contrast to the wide-eyed and delighted surprise of Nora’s own; the both of them seemingly ignorant as to the deviant that was sharing the table with them both. Ignorance was, truly, bliss. “You’ve just been volunteered for some more training.”  
  
“... Y-yay,” Jaune cheered, looking as if he was just about on the verge of tears as he lifted the thermos up to his lips… It didn’t take long for him to spit it back out. “What the hell! This isn’t vanilla! You lied to me!”  
  
That poor, poor boy… Ruby had fallen for that trap too at one point. She could relate.  
  
“I didn’t lie. It’s a protein shake, hero. That’s what was on the label and, so, it is,” Yang ground out, a drop of sweat (oh _jeez_ ) running down the side of her face as Nora’s blush of exertion started to move into the rest of her face and down her neck… Their arms were shaking so much that, if they’d been on the table, it would have cracked the whole thing in half. “If you want a _real_ lie though, I’ll start handing you fruit punch flavor instead.”  
  
Nora gasped and Pyrrha’s whole body _cringed_ in soul-deep disgust. “You monster!”  
  
“He’s gotta learn that things can always be worse at some point… Also, holy _fuck_ , Nora, you’re the real deal, aren’t you?”  
  
“I eat my Wheaties every morning, yeah,” Nora panted out, her free hand just about _clawing_ at the table at the same time as Yang clutched at her own knee with a death grip… If there was a time that Ruby had ever seen her sister get pushed that far, she couldn’t remember it. Maybe against Dad, but… But he was _Dad_. “Like a big girl.”  
  
“And here I am with the pants.”  
  
Nora giggle-snorted at that and her arm _shifted_. It was a small shift, less than an inch, but it was progress for Yang… Ruby, and several people around them ( _even Blake and Weiss_ ) were more interested in this mess than they probably should have been. Than Ruby should have been, anyway. Her breakfast was getting cold and classes were about to start any second now… Her sense of direction could have been better. “Oh, that was _dirty_.”  
  
“Just a bit,” Yang admitted shamelessly. “But I think this has gone on for long enough. I’m hungry.”  
  
“Wha-” Nora started before Yang purposely gave way; disengaged from the competition entirely and sent Ruby’s partner flying through the air and over the table without even having to lift a finger. That she didn’t _hit_ the table and actually went and hit the wall behind Yang, where she then slid down said wall, said a lot about...a lot. The strength the two of them had was just freakish but, honestly, Ruby was just glad that her food hadn’t gone boom. “HEY!”  
  
“Winning the battle doesn’t mean you won the war!” Yang called back before tucking into her own meal of bacon, bacon, and more bacon with toast. “Consider that a lesson!”  
  
Yang was having fun...and Ruby’s hairstyle got to live another hour longer. Cool.  
  
“Hey, Rubaby, you’ve been looking kinda down.” Yang leaned forward over the table, the loud cursing of her name and looks and hygiene by Nora nothing but noise to her as she opened her arms wide. “Do you need a hug? Did you miss your big sister?”  
  
“No.” Ruby might have spoken a little too soon...and a little too quickly, that twitch of Yang’s lips said. “I’m fine.”  
  
She just had to hope that Yang bought it.  
  
“That’s right, Ruby. You’re fine.” Yang sniffed and wiped away an imaginary tear as she fell back into her seat like a rock. “She’s so strong.” The blonde whispered out of the side of her mouth to Weiss, her persona doing a complete 180 from manic to melancholic… If Ruby hadn’t known better, she’d have thought Yang was crazy. Thing was though, she _did_ know better. Yang was super sane. She just liked to pretend she wasn’t, like, all the time… It seemed to work for her, so Ruby didn’t think about it too hard. “They grow up so fast.”  
  
“Let me break my fast in peace, Xiao-Long, or I swear I’ll-”  
  
“Your bacon’s getting cold,” Ruby was quick to point out as a distraction, her fingers already at her hood, ready to flip it up when the time came.  
  
Yang looked down, let out a horrified gasp and, much to Weiss’s own, visible, horror, set her plate on fire by spitting on it. The rim and only the rim, using it as a makeshift and, hopefully, temporary heater. Hopefully. If Yang forgot about it, and didn’t keep it in place, that was kind of _it_. “Not anymore it isn’t!”  
  
Ruby, while that was going on snuck away with her breakfast under her arm. Like a ninja. Now, as long as she kept this up, she had nothing to worry about.  
  
“I DEMAND A REMATCH!”  
  
There was a crash. “BRING IT!”  
  
“IN FRONT OF MY MUFFINS! REALLY!?”  
  
Nothing at all…that wasn’t her problem, nope. Not today. She could be a leader tomorrow. Now...where was her next class again? Stupid first-day nonsense… Oh, well. Maybe she’d be on time for once?  
  
Unlikely, but one could hope.  
  
==========  
  
“For some reason, I felt that Professor Port’s heart wasn’t into teaching today,” Weiss said in tardy (Ruby tardy, even. Our bad sense of direction was genetic, I think.) observation as we all, as one, tramped back into our room with various degrees of energy. Jaune, falling to his knees with a painful sounding _clunk_ as the morning caught up with him, was expected. “His - exuberance - while very real, felt rather forced.”  
  
“What gave it away? The sighs? The constant glances at an empty cage?” The oh so subtle glares at me from under those eyebrows of his, maybe? Good lord, how did that man even _see_? Was it echolocation? Was that the reason he talked so much, as a remedy for his self-enforced blindness? “Or, hell, I think him _admitting_ that he’d been looking forward to something special that day before an unavoidable crisis came up was enough to get the point across.”  
  
Raging forest fires made capturing live Grimm hard. Who would have thought? Whoops.  
  
“I never want to do that again,” Blake added before Weiss could get going again, her fingers rubbing under her eyes to get the sleep out. “He’s a real manly man that could survive on nothing but air and tree bark. I get it. What I didn’t get was what anything he said had to do with learning how to kill Grimm… I hope that this was just orientation, I really do.”  
  
“There must have been a point to it,” Weiss replied, finding her hill to die on and choosing...poorly. “He’s a teacher of Beacon Academy. An educator at the best Hunting school in all four Kingdoms. The lesson might have been just too complex for us to understand.”  
  
As I gathered my towel from my drawer, Jaune forced himself onto his feet and Blake fell onto her bed with her face, I gave the heiress a flat look. The flattest look. Positively 2D, sucker, feel that cutting edge. “Yes. I’m sure that knowing about how he fought his way out of the Grimmlands with nothing but a head of cabbage and one of his old boots is going to save our lives one day.”  
  
“Nobody asked you!”  
  
“Nobody didn’t not ask me,” I pointed out cheerily as I shucked the first layer from my top, a slightly modified male school jacket that the school had made an allowance for after being notified of my ‘condition’... I was going to have to have another talk with them though, and soon. I needed the entire set let out some more because, every time I took a breath, I could feel buttons _strain_ and fibers _stretch_ … The fuck was this, an AV? In an actual, non-Japanese school? Not cool, guys. Time and a place. “Not my fault you didn’t specify.”  
  
“By the gods, Xiao-Long!” Weiss reared back with a hysterical squawk as I turned to face her on my way to the shower with a towel in hand. She put her hands over her eyes and everything, the sexually repressed harridan. “Have you ever heard of a tailor!?”  
  
Much tact. Such wow.  
  
“I have, yeah. Hell, I’m going to see one as soon as I get a free day. This is ridiculously tight.” Putting a fist on a cocked out hip, I struck a confident pose and ignored the feeling of cold air slipping in through the gaps of my button up...and Jaune falling over again with a cry as he caught sight of me just about bursting out of my clothes. For someone that had seven sisters, he was surprisingly sheltered. “Also, good god, girl. You act like you’ve never seen a fourth of a tit before.”  
  
Deciding that continuing this with a crack at Weiss’ bust wasn’t in my best interest at the moment (we weren’t nearly close enough for it. Later.), I slipped around her and did what I had to do...for a given value of what I had to do.  
  
I hadn’t forgotten about what was coming in a week and I doubt that Neo had either. The tape was going to be getting a workout this week but that was okay. It was for the greater good...of my dick.  
  
What? I was seventeen years old and had a dick. Everything came back to the dick at some point.  
  
“Yang?” There was a timid knock at the door. “I need to use the restroom…”  
  
_Everything_.


	7. Chapter 7

“I give up for today. Screw this.” Putting action to words, I closed my desktop scroll. Slid it carefully back into its spot, locked it in, and kicked my chair back just shy of tipping my ass over before I swung out. “If I wanted to get my balls busted I’d see a professional.”  
  
Not that I would. I had my tastes, plenty, but CBT wasn’t one of them. Gods, no. I liked it when my junk _wasn’t_ screaming at me… Having Neo kiss it better only went so far.  
  
“Having a hard time with homework?” Blake asked, nose deep in a suspiciously-sleeved hardback; going through the motions now that she’d been pulled out of her smutty little fantasy land. If she’d wanted to be subtle about her genre preferences, putting a sleeve on wasn’t how you did it. Of course, this was Blake Belladonna, so… “It sounds like you’re having a hard time with homework.”  
  
“And it sounds like you’re enjoying yourself as I suffer.” I didn’t confirm or deny what I’d been having problems with, but it wasn’t homework. Definitely not. I’d gotten through that stuff hours ago, even if the math junk had been kind of a bitch… I’d been writing for over a decade now and it hadn’t gotten any easier. Herpa derp blarp; The process in action. “The world is a cruel, dark place. There is no fairness. No justice.”  
  
“How dare it not spread your misery to those around you,” Blake agreed dryly as she turned a page. “However will you cope?”  
  
“Tits and little drinks with umbrellas in them. Those help.” My musing got me a sharp laugh and a sideways look from our team’s token Faunus. “But, yeah. Seriously. Moving on. Where’d Jaune and Weiss go?”  
  
I hadn’t seen them all day, since breakfast. Seeing as it was already sometime in the afternoon, that was a while.  
  
“Weiss is trying to replace Jaune as the leader of our team, and Jaune is hiding from you.”  
  
… That made sense.  
  
“Oh. Yeah. That sounds like them.” I shrugged, somewhat bemused by the foibles of my fellow Hunters. “Jaune does realize that this is where all his stuff is, right?”  
  
“I didn’t say he was doing a good job of it. Just that he was hiding.” She pulled her head out of her book to give me actual eye contact. A miracle, raised brow notwithstanding. “Nothing on Weiss?”  
  
“That isn’t going anywhere.” I waved that idea off with an actual wave of the hand for added emphasis. “And she wouldn’t listen if I told her that anyway. Might as well let her find out by herself.”  
  
Blake hummed but didn’t disagree. Not a surprise, seeing who she was and who we were talking about. The thought of a Schnee eating crow probably got her panties moist. “I see.”  
  
“Hopefully, she’ll even out some. Enough for movie night to work its magic. I hope,” I groaned as I put a tired hand through my hair. “We might not have gotten off on the right foot.”  
  
Blake’s silence was pointed.  
  
“I’m not perfect. Don’t you judge.” Taking a moment to flop onto my couch and appreciate its softness, I continued. “I’d like to blame my Semblance, but that’s kind of a cop-out, I guess.”  
  
You made your Semblance. The Semblance didn’t make you. It was the deepest expression of your soul being pushed out into the world...and ‘not magic’ my ass. I could spit _fire_ and _acid_ , my sister could nearly break the sound barrier on foot and my Uncle could affect casuality by just _existing_. Get your semantics out of my goddamn face.  
  
The lack of page-turning before she spoke was even more pointed. I’d caught Blake’s attention now, even if just a part. “What _is_ your Semblance anyway?”  
  
With a nonsensical wiggle of my fingers and a scrunching of the nose, I gave her my best possible answer. “Complicated.”  
  
Blake huffed. “Complicated isn’t an answer.”  
  
“You have the ability to create clones out of the light of your soul. Does that mean that, until they disappear into nothing when you’re done with them, they might have souls as well?”  
  
She blinked at me, hard, her book almost falling out of her fingers. The shock was real. “It's too early for this.”  
  
“Its four in the afternoon.”  
  
“Too early.” She shook her head, mind blown and in the middle of being repressed. “That’s the sort of stuff you think about at midnight while wasted. I don’t have time for that nonsense.”  
  
“Like I said.” A double snap of the fingers in her general direction ensued. “Complicated.” One of my arms fell off the couch; the tips of my fingers dragging lazily along the plush softness of the carpet beneath as I let out a yawn. “Just remember to knock gently if the partition is down and I’m behind it.”  
  
“... Pardon?”  
  
“Remember the glass that blocked my space off from the rest of the room? That?” I turned my head to lock my eyes with hers, making sure to be as clear as possible about how serious I was. “When it comes down, the inside becomes a Class 1, Division 1 Hazard site. Do you know what that is?”  
  
Blake’s already pale features became a little paler. If anyone would know what that meant, it would be a former terrorist, huh? “Oh.”  
  
“It’s rated to take an internal explosion just short of what you can get from a mostly full cargo container of Dust,” I assured with some slight exaggeration...slight. When Dust blew, it blew _hard_ , but it wasn’t all that far off. If anything had been a money vampire, it was the explosion proofing. “Just taking precautions.”  
  
Blake took a deep breath as color returned to her face. “... So the chimney is for…?  
  
“Extracting airborne toxins and smoke, yeah.” I nodded. “It's also really nice to have around during the winter.”  
  
“And you couldn’t have done - whatever you’re doing - in the chemistry lab, because…?”  
  
“The chemistry lab isn’t rated for a cargo containers’ worth of dust.”  
  
“... That’s fair.” The brunette tilted her head at me. “Did you already tell Weiss and Jaune?”  
  
“No.” I sighed and kicked my feet some as I readied myself for a move. If I could do everything I wanted/had to do from the comfort of my seat, the world would be a better place. “That’s why I asked where they’d gone. Kind of hard to impress the need for caution on someone when they aren’t even around, ya know?”  
  
“And you chose to tell me first, rather than wait for a time when we were all together? I’m flattered.” With those last words, she buried her face in her book again, as good as saying that our conversation was over.  
  
That I was well on my way out made it easy, that my multi-layered distraction had worked a balm on my soul and load off my back. Explaining my Semblance had gotten old forever ago and, often, more than I’d like, the nuances involved required loads.  
  
Why people couldn’t just accept ‘Dragon’ without making a production out of things, I had no clue. If anyone was bullshit, it was Miss Goodwitch. Ridiculous was what she was...and where would I hide if I was Jaune?  
  
… He wouldn’t, would he? … It didn’t hurt to check.  
  
With a mumbled ‘going out’ and a wave, I was out in the hallway; across the hall with my knuckles rapping against team RRVN’s door. “Hey, guys?” I couldn’t help but snicker when I heard the telltale sound that was someone trying to hide something under a bed. That, or trying to hide. They were all very similar things. “Can Jaune come out and play?”  
  
After a short time waiting, the rustling stopped and was replaced with hushed whispers. My sister trying to get my glorious leader out from wherever he’d stuffed himself (if he spent half this much effort on training, this wouldn’t be a problem), and obviously failing at it. The stomp of one of her boots on the floor said as much.  
  
The forced smile she’d slapped on, just in time for it to be my first look at her when Pyrrha opened the door, just tacked on another layer of evidence. The poor thing couldn’t lie to save her life, as long as you knew what to look for. Ruby had never been able to train out the extra tooth she tended to show when hiding something and, boy, was she showing some teeth.  
  
That wasn’t important though. We both knew what was up. What was, were the vaguely hostile and passive-aggressive vibes coming off of Pyrrha. From what I could tell, she wasn’t mad. Not really. She was more - wary… That, or I was reading into something that wasn’t there. The two of us hadn’t exactly spent a lot of time together and going by what I knew of her only went so far; not exactly enough time to figure out where we stood.  
  
If I wasn’t wrong about the vibes though, I was just going to have to assume that Jaune had been telling stories. I’d been a little tough on him, yeah, but it wasn’t because I was a dick. It was because he wouldn’t move otherwise and, boy, was that shit _infuriating_. Worse than infuriating. He seesawed back and forth between ‘ _I know what I’m doing_ ’, clearly showing he didn’t, and ‘ _how do I put the pin back into a grenade_ ’.  
  
… I hadn’t actually thrown a grenade at him. Of course not. Dud or not, that was pretty fucked… It was just _Jaune_. _Jaune_ did as _Jaune_ is. I had a long road ahead of me and that didn’t exactly make me a perfect font of peace and understanding, especially when him being himself wasn’t just a joke, but an actual hazard.  
  
His issues wouldn’t just get him killed. It would get _us_ killed. Shape up. Wash up. One or the other, hopefully without a healthy dose of PTSD to go with it; I was far too kind to him.  
  
“Jaune isn’t here right now. I’m sorry,” Pyrrha replied with her press face on, the current silence (whoops) having forced her to start the conversation to keep this from getting even more awkward. The sort of look she put on when she had to answer questions about her non-existent love life in front of a horde of rag writers. “Have you tried calling him?”  
  
“Yeah. I did.” I took a peek over her shoulder. Tried to rather, thanks to her using her skills in the arena to block my view with a seemingly casual movement of her head. “He turned his scroll off after the first ring.”  
  
“Maybe it ran out of power?”  
  
“Doing what? Playing host to the CCT network?” I had to ask as I went for a look over the other shoulder, the raising of her arm against the door jamb a more obvious show that she was intentionally obstructing my view. If she was trying this hard, his hiding place must not have been that good. “He charged that sucker overnight, but thanks for trying to make me feel better about...” I rose my voice an octave, a hand cupped to the side of my mouth to help it project some more. “Our leader avoiding his teammates!”  
  
A high-pitched, if muffled, sound of distress from within the room was the answer to my accusation...and I couldn’t resist.  
  
“Oh no! Did you hear that?” I gasped. “Some girl is in trouble!”  
  
“Hey!” Jaune replied, causing a putout Pyrrha to sag in place as all her work went nowhere. “I’m not- ah, crap… This is a recording?”  
  
That had worked better than I thought it would.  
  
“Amazing. My leader has truly thought of everything.” I flapped my hand to the side, a suggestion that a reluctant Pyrrha took with a pout so that I could step into the room with an exasperated Ruby, off to tinker with her weapon while Jaune kept hiding under a bed...with his shoes sticking out of the end. Him being six feet tall and in a hurry had bit him on the butt. “If he isn’t out of the Kingdom by now, I’d be surprised. I’ll never find him now.”  
  
He sighed the sigh of a prisoner and, without anyone having to pull him out from under, shuffled out into the greater room. Wow. Dramatic. “Yeah. That wasn’t my best.”  
  
“I’d have been worried if it was.” Now that that was over with (for now) I turned to my sister, mid-disassembling of her baby. “Did you already tell them about knocking first?”  
  
“Yeah. Course I did.” Ruby gave me a curt nod, all business as she pulled a barrel brush out without even looking at me and went to town on Crescent Rose’s delicate insides; all finesse and artistry, the twirl of her wrist the sign of a real master at work… You might think I was exaggerating, but Ruby was _good_. “Like - you’re right across from us, yeah? I don’t need anyone kicking the door down to tell you something only to get a face full of death gas.”  
  
When she said ‘kick the door down’ we all knew who she meant.  
  
“... Death gas?” Jaune mouthed almost silently to himself, Pyrrha’s silent appraisal of my form going without comment.  
  
The girl was a champion fighter, much as she hated it. If she didn’t size me up, knowing something of what I could do, I’d be disappointed. If Ruby had told her everything about me I’d be surprised. Also, slightly betrayed...but mostly surprised.  
  
My little sister was the leader of her own team now. She had people to look out for. Priorities had to shift _somewhere_.  
  
“Yeah, Jaune. Death gas.” I crossed my arms over my chest, the new fit of my uniform comforming to my body pleasantly comfortable. “I decided to stop trying to tell you guys all at once, seeing as that’s never a thing outside of Breakfast and with way too many witnesses...so, yeah. When the glass comes down on my room. Don’t touch unless you want to find out what breathing acid feels like.”  
  
Better to err on the side of caution here. I can barely trust him with a sword as it was. Letting him approach my lab while I was in the middle of work was definitely something that I wasn’t willing to do… I’d set a forest on fire _without_ his input. With?  
  
I liked Beacon. It would be a real shame if something happened to it, capiche?  
  
“Anyway, yeah. That’s good. Now it's just Weiss that needs to know.” I put a hand through my glorious locks with a huff. “Also, Jaune. I get that I’m kind of hard on you, but, come on, man. I haven’t seen you all day and, when I do, its to find out that you’ve turned off your scroll and that you’re hiding under…” I gave the area a quick look. “Ren’s bed rather than deal with me. We haven’t even been on a team for a week yet, dude.”  
  
“Ah…” Jaune started sweating, instantly put on the back foot. “Well, it wasn’t that I was _hiding_ -”  
  
“We helped him with his homework,” Ruby added while cleaning a smudge off the trigger guard and giving me an affirmative glance… We had our ways of speaking without words, we did. “He was only under Ren’s bed for, like, three minutes at most.”  
  
Doing homework? The work of home? With people that weren’t his team, at least to start? He was just digging the hole deeper and deeper, wasn’t he? He could have at least talked to _Blake_ , his _partner_ , if he didn’t feel comfortable with Weiss and I...had he even tried?  
  
“R-Ruby...” Jaune pulled at the collar of his shirt, the kitchen a little too hot for him as a flat look from me put him on the metaphorical pan. “I don’t think that was the right way to-”  
  
“Sorry, Jaune.” Ruby sent him a sympathetic look while Pyrrha stood nearby, clearly conflicted as to how she could help; Jaune and her were just made for each other, weren't they? “I’m just saying how it happened and nothing else.”  
  
“Movie night. Tonight. Just the team,” I decided for everyone involved, those here or not. Seeing as no one was doing anything, I could only assume it was up to me. Standing around and waiting for someone else to get things done just wasn’t in me. All action, all the time. “We’re going to eat snack food, drink soda, watch terrible movies till we’re sick and clear the air some.”  
  
“I- uh.” Jaune stopped flapping his mouth like he was a fish in record time, the sudden whiplash he’d just gotten from the change in topic just about kneecapping his social skills. “Movies?”  
  
“We’ll make fun of them. Throw popcorn at the screen. Find out if Weiss knows what a TorchQuick energy drink is.”  
  
Jaune looked visibly interested at that last part...in a ‘watching a trainwreck’ sort of way. It was much the same for me, honestly. Weiss on energy drinks just sounded _weird_. “What if she doesn’t?”  
  
“Social pressure shall be applied. A hyped-up Weiss shall be witnessed.” I gave him a pat on the shoulder. Ruby a (hated) kiss on the forehead. Pyrrha a somewhat awkward moment where we weren’t entirely sure whether we were going to shake hands or slap them together before we decided on a half-assed mixture of both. “Anyway, tonight, Jaune.”  
  
“Tonight.” He rubbed the back of his neck with a weak chuckle. “Okay. Tonight.”  
  
“Tonight.” And, with that, I was gone. Gone on the wind, already hitting up my scroll to get everything ready for a night of average teenage debauchery that didn’t involve a DUI test or a pregnancy scare.  
  
As the host of this little shindig, it was my responsibility to provide for it...and this had to be _good_ if we were going to pull together even a little.  
  
Dysfunctional could be fun. This level of dysfunction though? Eh… It could use some cleaning up. A good scrub and some glue. The basics.  
  
**_Here we go again._**

 

 


	8. Chapter 8

  
Weiss’ day hadn’t been the best. If she was honest, neither was her week. It hadn’t even finished yet but, so far, she’d found herself - unimpressed. Various levels of upset that had ranged from ‘vaguely irritated’ to ‘apocalyptically mad’, all before the week had even actually finished.  
  
What day was it now? Thursday? It felt like it had been forever. Nothing had gone as she’d expected it to so far. None of this was like what Winter had described to her when the older Schnee had gone through her training at the Academy, not even a little bit. Weiss wouldn’t miss the rigid formality: salutes, proper uniforms, regimented food; But some form of _sense_ , a frame of reference for her to come back to would have been appreciated.  
  
How anyone thought that _Jaune Arc_ was leader material was beyond her...but, of course, that might have been why she wasn’t a teacher. Ozpin had to see _something_ in him that was worth keeping, even if she didn’t.  
  
Even if (curse them to the darkest part of the Grimmlands) her partner didn’t… The blonde monster wouldn’t have been working so hard to replace and repair everything about their leader otherwise.  
  
It would have been admirable... _should_ have been admirable, if not for who they were talking about.  
  
Weiss sighed and shook her head, her shoulders falling in an imperceptible slump as she made her way back to her room empty-handed… Metaphorically. The title she’d been after had eluded her and, now, here she was. Slightly tired, a touch peckish, and with the odd and unusual feeling that was her being unable to get her way.  
  
She wasn’t sure she liked it. That it had failed her, or that she’d expected it _not_ to fail her. One, the other, both; having it thrown in her face, that she was spoiled even if rather gently by a figure of authority, had been a shock.  
  
If anyone had ever talked to Weiss like that before, she couldn’t remember when or… Wait. No. That was wrong. She _could_ remember. She could remember _clearly_.  
  
Turning into the hallway that led to her dorm room, a scowl crept across her face. The urge to stomp the rest of the way rose up like a Leviathan, only to be brutally beaten down by a thing that she liked to call ‘self-control’... If Weiss had been forced to give it a voice it would have sounded a great deal like her sister, she was sure.  
  
_‘Don’t stab them, freeze them, or put your heels up their rear, Sister. Especially not in ambush.’_ Imaginary Winter shook an imaginary finger. _‘That wouldn’t be becoming of a Schnee. Do it in the ring or not at all. It will all come out, one way or the other.’_  
  
“... Thank you so very much,” Weiss couldn’t help but mumble back at the figment as it faded away, astounded by just how _clear_ that admonishment had been. Winter hadn’t actually been visible (that would have meant a visit to the nurse, certainly) but... Was this one of the symptoms of what people called ‘homesickness’?  
  
What a terrible thing it was.  
  
Leaving that behind, along with her worries about her mental health, Weiss swiped her scroll across the door and found herself feeling - woefully overdressed. That, and like her faith in authority had taken a glancing blow as she took in the sight of Jaune, in broad daylight, wearing that onesie of his. The one with the ears and the floppy feet and… He _was_ seventeen, wasn’t he? … Weiss was (mostly) sure he was and, once she looked around, she noticed that he wasn’t the only thing out of place.  
  
There had been changes while she was away. Yang had pulled her couch out in front of the dorm’s TV and placed her coffee table right between the two. The second thing she noticed was the food. The drinks. A large pile of colorful and mismatched snacks and candies, most of which she’d never even heard of, and an empty, striped popcorn tub as tall as her torso was long.  
  
That last item was the only one that Weiss could recognize with any certainty. One of her father’s more - inconsequential - associates had been the owner of a chain of movie theaters… Her father hadn’t particularly cared for the venue after the first time, feeling that it was much too low brow for him or any of his family to be seen frequenting.  
  
It had been the last time she’d seen a movie on the silver screen; There might have been the beginning of a pattern here, somewhere, if she only looked for it.  
  
“What is this?” Weiss asked not _quite_ comprehending what she was looking at. That Blake took the time to walk into her field of vision in a kimono cut bathrobe, showing far more leg (and not looking entirely happy about it) than Weiss could have ever expected just deepened her confusion. “What am I looking at?”  
  
If this was the start of an orgy, someone was going to get frostbite on their genitals or her name wasn’t Weiss Schnee.  
  
“It’s a sleepover, Weiss. A team bonding exercise,” Yang drawled, hand on her hip and metal popcorn popper under her arm, the ping of popping kernels from within loud and clear… What a petty use of a Semblance. Weiss wasn’t entirely sure what Yang’s was, but some form of control over heat was clearly a part… Petty. “Never had one before?”  
  
There were plenty of words to describe the - individual - known as Yang Xiao-Long. Daring would be a good one. Forceful would be another. Rude, loud, thoughtless and utterly batshit (forgive her language) was an especially poignant combination... None of those words would explain why said blonde girl was wearing a full-length flannel nightgown though. The sort you would see on prudish farmwives in the dead of winter, as long as you took off the glaringly bright flame motif on it; that she’d seen it in the dark more than once hadn’t quite impressed on her how garish it was.  
  
How Yang hadn’t melted into a puddle of sweat or blinded someone with her clothing, was a question for the ages.  
  
“I have, yes,” Weiss responded calmly while leaving the circumstances out entirely. This might have been new ground, but even she knew that sharing a hotel with her future peers in industry was not quite the same thing as what Yang was asking from her… She’d be damned if she admitted it to Yang though, so that was that. “It was just never quite so-”  
  
Weiss was saved from finding a sufficiently - sufficient - description by being dropped into yet another dilemma right off.  
  
“Do you like chocolate?” Yang interrupted with a non sequitur, her eyes filled to bursting with that damnably manic light that was always in them to some degree. How anyone was so capable of sticking to a theme ( _so much fire_ ) as she was, Weiss couldn’t comprehend. “Vanilla? Strawberry? A mix of all three or rocky road?” The hand at her hip rose up to her mouth as she let out a gasp. “Or, dare I say, you’d prefer something more _exotic_?”  
  
Weiss narrowed her eyes at the blonde, suspicious as she looked for a trap in the words. Seeming only half as bright as her hair color afforded her, Xiao-Long had shown herself to someone of no little wit when it came to wordplay. “What do you mean by that?”  
  
“I’m asking if you like pistachio or something. Black cherry, maybe.” Hand still at her mouth, the corners of her purple eyes crinkled in a smile as puffs of popcorn scented steam slid up along her side to curl around her face; much as Weiss had expected, there was a joke in there somewhere, just waiting to be unleashed. “What did you think I meant?”  
  
Weiss continued to stare Yang down.  
  
“Yang brought loads over. Many of them flavors I’ve never even heard of,” Blake added from her seat on the couch as she gave the obsidian-colored desert in her lap a thoughtful look... If it were any darker, it would absorb light. “Charcoal Coconut isn’t that bad. Tangy.”  
  
“I asked someone I knew to give me a lineup. A real connoisseur.” As the pops slowed, Yang shifted it into her hands and gave it a shake. “She’d never forgive me if I used ice cream as a tool of warfare, so, come on. Have a taste.” Her smile grew. “We have plenty of vanilla.”  
  
“You’ve ruined it for me. You’ve ruined my favorite flavor.” Jaune shuddered. “Forever.”  
  
The tip of Yang’s tongue poked out of her mouth, a flash of pink that she was visibly biting down on as her shoulders shook. For what reason Weiss, like many things today, could not fathom. “Oh, come on, Boss. It wasn’t _that_ bad.”  
  
“Just… I don’t-” he sagged. “Just give me some chocolate, please.”  
  
“With sprinkles?”  
  
“Yeah…”  
  
“Sure! Can do!” Yang waved Jaune’s obvious if childish anguish aside with a chirp while pouring the popcorn into the bucket. “You guys looked through the movies already, yeah?”  
  
Weiss’ took another look around, a quick one, before taking the initiative to break the very short silence. There was, in fact, a stack of movies on the table. A large one. They’d blended in with everything else until she’d had reason to look deeper. “Without me?”  
  
Weiss knew how that sounded, but it was nothing like that. She wasn’t hurt. She wasn’t feeling left out. Of course not. Weiss was just commenting on the rudeness inherent in choosing an activity without all members present, yes.  
  
Yang scoffed as she shook out the last kernels over the top. “Of course not. We were just picking our personal favorites for the night. Do yours or take a pass and we’ll start the party.” Her eyes did a flicker to the upper left, then back down; the popper discarded for her to put both fists on her rather ample hips. “Also, you’ve gotta change. Pronto.”  
  
Weiss found herself taking a step back as the rest of the team turned their heads and gave her their full attention. Jaune with his customary guilelessness and Blake with her eternally cool judgment; Yang as cheerfully domineering as ever, the trace of her eyes over Weiss’ frame causing the heiress to tense as goosebumps rose across her skin.  
  
It was like she was a rabbit in the midst of wild animals, all of them looking for a moment of weakness.  
  
“Sleepovers have a very strict dress code. A set of rules that are sacrosanct. Something you should know all about.” And there was Yang’s oddly complete vocabulary again; random words that were entirely appropriate grammatically but odd, if still correct, in context. Them coming from someone in their nightwear just made it _surreal_. “Sleepovers require nighties. Jammies. Overly large shirts. Teddies if you’ve got them.”  
  
“... Teddies?”  
  
Yang’s smile fell slightly as her joke, and it had to have been a joke, fell flat. Ignorance, when applied correctly, was as good as any defense...and Weiss just had to assume that a teddy was something crude. “You’re not exactly - worldly, are you?” The blond shrugged and moved on before a reply could be made, the pair that was Jaune and Blake moving away from staring at her to debate the merits of the movie they had chosen at varying levels of volume. “I’ll explain it to you later, I guess.”  
  
That was a hard ‘no’.  
  
“I’m fine with what little knowledge I have, thank you.” If Weiss wanted to know what Yang had meant, she owned a scroll. Better that than to have a ‘teddy’ described to her in the worst possible way.  
  
Another shrug from Yang was her answer. “That’s fine. As long as you let your hair down tonight, it's all good.” That and a pat on the shoulder that had Weiss stiffening up in surprise, a touch of acid on her tongue ready to be spoken in defense if required… That had been the first time that Yang had ever touched her outside of a combat scenario. Today was a day of firsts, it seemed. “We’ll be waiting for you, Weiss.”  
  
Weiss blinked at that. At the assumption that she was going to come back. That she was going to follow the rules of their impromptu party, that she had nothing better to do with her day, and that she wanted to watch movies at all; how rude. How presumptive. How very _Yang_. How… **_How_** …  
  
Damn it.  
  
Weiss was in the bathroom, ‘letting her hair down’ as it were before she even really thought about it. School clothes neatly folded away. Her nightie on and slippers on her feet.  
  
She could only blame the call of a good sherbet for her lack of control and good judgment… She dearly hoped that they had blueberry. Orange would do in a pinch, of course, but there was nothing quite like blueberry.  
  
Yang had offered. If she didn’t have it, there were going to be _words_.  
  
==========  
  
You know, I think this is going to turn out okay for once.  
  
I might have been a little - manipulative - in the way I’d handled Wiess...but I didn’t mean anything by it. I’d poked at her some, pushed buttons that someone with her personality would have been unable to resist pushing back on; the image she assumed among her peers, her unspoken need for companionship with said peers, and her vindictive need to show me up in some way.  
  
If she was looking to eventually blindside me with a _really_ out there flavor of ice cream, I wished her luck. Through knowing Neo, I’d had more than enough time and incentive to make some influential contacts in the frozen dairy market. Men and women of means that could turn things my way on a scroll call.  
  
Neo preferred her ice cream stolen. I preferred getting mine in bulk and without getting shot at. It was a spot of contention between the two of us, one that had led to a really silly cold war and the sort of spycraft to make Vale’s secret service (they existed, damn it!) sweat.   
  
It was long over by now but the effects were still being felt to this day, mostly in how easily it was for me to get takeout whenever I wanted it. That, and Junior’s drinks getting a noticeable markup when it came to me. He needed to launder the debt _somehow,_ and… Never mind. That didn’t need retreading.  
  
Things were actually okay. Blake and Weiss were still tense, for obvious reasons, but Jaune was really shining here; being mostly oblivious when it came to the interpersonal issues of his team and dragging us along with him. What the guy lacked in physical and romantic capabilities, he made up for in charisma. A weird, sort of anemic, charisma...but charisma all the same.  
  
It was probably all that confidence he was faking. Do it hard enough, long enough, and you’d even fool yourself. I’d seen it happen before and I’d see it happen again. Shine on, you crazy diamond.  
  
“This is the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen,” Weiss said with a handful of candy halfway up to her mouth and a pair of eyes that refused to leave the screen. Stupid or not, she was hooked. “I don’t care how old those Ursai are. As soon as the tornado took them, they were dead. End of story. They wouldn’t be - flying around and attacking people on the way like they weren’t being tossed around and ground up by debris.”  
  
“I don’t know about that,” Blake muttered from around a gummy fish, knees pulled up to her chest and a pillow under them to keep her modesty. “I’ve heard some crazy stuff about the West.”  
  
“Rumors.”  
  
“Often have some truth in them.” Blake didn’t deny. “Not like anyone actually knows what’s out there.”  
  
“Exactly. No one knows.” Weiss daintily ate her bittles, the lack of runny coloring on her fingers something I was sort of jealous about. I couldn’t hold onto candy for half a minute without it turning into soup. Gods _forbid_ I put any in my pocket. “If a Grimm can’t handle me stabbing them in the face, they can’t handle a length of straw being driven through them like a stake. Tell me when that changes and we’ll talk.”  
  
“Guys. Forget that for a second. Just a second.” Jaune butted in, his ice cream long gone. “Now, call me crazy.”  
  
“You’re crazy,” was my contribution.  
  
“Thanks, Yang, but come _on_.” He rolled his eyes. “The hero’s Semblance is just so...”  
  
“Contrived?” Was my second contribution.  
  
“Yeah, that. I mean, their Semblance is ‘surviving in extreme weather’.” He scoffed. “What kind of Semblance is that even?”  
  
There was quiet.  
  
I sighed and took a drink of my soda. “Boys.”  
  
Weiss hummed in agreement around the time the token asshole of the cast got himself yanked out a window and put into a midair death roll until he exploded. A classic. “A useful one, I think. Situational, but useful. Considering how Atlas is, even during the summer, or the ever-present heat of Vacuo during the day… I’d think that traveling and dressing right for the weather wouldn’t be so much of a problem. It sounds nice.”  
  
Jaune began to look unsure; nervous as he realized that his ignorance was showing. He clearly had some unrealistic expectations of Semblances, most likely due to popular media, and if he wasn’t careful it was going to bite him somewhere tender real soon… That my intervention was somewhat derogatory, hiding his disbelief behind a stereotypical love of carnage for his gender, was a sad, but necessary, decision that I’d been forced to make.  
  
Totally.  
  
“I’d have killed to have a Semblance like that,” Blake admitted, revealing a lot more about herself than we’d gotten since day one. “It would have made camping a lot easier, that’s for sure.”  
  
I bet.  
  
“Not all Semblances are about going boom, Jaune.” Not all of us could be so lucky...and, yes. I was able to recognize the irony here. I just didn’t care. “You shouldn’t be so judgemental, just because his Semblance isn’t all that flashy.”  
  
“Well… Alright. Fine.” Jaune swallowed his disbelief. “I guess Grimm count as extreme weather now?”  
  
“You’ve never had tiny Nevermore get blown into your tent because the wind picked up. I can tell.” Blake commented, her voice full of long-remembered pain. “Feathers. Feathers everywhere… Do we still have strawberry?”  
  
I toed the half-full carton on the table closer to her end of the couch and got myself a nod of thanks for the effort. An unsung hero, I was. What would she have done without me chasing the bad thoughts away? Get all existential, I’d think. Blow up parliament. Something like that...and they’d totally have it coming, I think. If it wasn’t for the janitors and interns…  
  
Good thing I was here. Right.  
  
“Yeah. That would be pretty useful. Not all Semblances are meant for direct fighting.” Not something I’d like to have, being perfectly happy with my own Semblance, but it did sound nice. “I bet there’s someone out there, an evil overlord whose entire gimmick is making an endless amount of zucchini to bury his neighbors in.”  
  
Weiss sighed and blew some hair out of her face as she tried to pull herself out of the slouch my couch tended to force people into. Nice to see she was getting comfortable...ish. This was just the start and it’d be a while before I could start poking fun at her for real, I think. “Gods, that’s dumb.”  
  
I didn’t even last a second before coming out with the sort of reply only a well-adjusted sibling could have given. “Your face.”  
  
And, much like a well-adjusted sibling, I couldn't help but chuckle inappropriately as she turned her head at me, her cheeks puffed out and red in embarrassment and possible anger; my resolution to be a better person hadn’t lasted long… Not that it counted, what with it not being made on the New Years...but, still. I had failed.  
  
She didn’t do much for a good ten seconds. A good, long ten seconds that only ended when she stuck her tongue out at me, pulled it back in, and looked astoundingly embarrassed and surprised about it; another handful of bittles rising to her face as she turned back to the screen.  
  
… I’d just got her to act her age.  
  
**_Virtuous Mission, Complete._**


	9. Chapter 9

 

  
As I disappeared into the weekend crowd, Jaune was the only one to wave back at me. The only one that managed to do so before my team and I lost sight of each other after a long day of bonding, shenanigans, and bonding over shenanigans as was the usual. That was the most I could have hoped for while him and Blake held a twitching Weiss between them, her blood more stimulants than actual blood and eyes popped open in that way you only saw in sleep-deprived college students and people who’d seen eternity.

  
All Weiss had needed to ascend to the next plane of existence had been a single gulp. Just a single taste of Torchquick (after seeing me have one, she couldn’t _not_ try it without looking like a coward) had, after the customary gagging of an energy drink virgin, been enough to knock her right onto her cute little butt. That, and have her looking like a downtown Joyhead on a bender just before they started dancing in the sewer water because they thought it was made of liquid rainbows.  
  
_Looked_. Not was. I wouldn’t have been laughing otherwise. Sewer water dancing was gross, man.  
  
I felt a little bad for not stopping her, but how was I supposed to know that the strongest thing she’d had before this was coffee? At any rate, she’d be fine after letting it get out of her system. I knew for a fact that there was _zero_ Joy in these drinks and, by god, there never would be. Roman was kind of a gigantic, mascara wearing, _dick_...but peddling the hard shit wasn’t him. He was a showman, a conman. When the man fleeced his marks, he liked it _clean_...and there wasn’t much cleaner than corporate work.  
  
As sickening as he’d found it, and still found it, he fit right into the culture...even if he couldn’t quite let go of his ‘old’ ways.  
  
I was pretty damn sure he was running a laundering scheme through his business ventures. Multiple. Also, that he was more than just a little hands on when it came to his corporate espionage...but, really, what business beyond your average mom-and-pop didn’t do that? Sure, most didn’t actually go to do said espionage in _person_ , but that was just the name of the game.  
  
As long as he wasn’t killing people, either through being himself or by giving out shit quality merchandise, I couldn’t give a shit. It didn’t hurt that Torchquick, after some fixing up from its literally toxic original formula, was actually pretty good. Once you got past the starting bite, it tasted like a dream; mixed with hard liquor and ice you had yourself a party. A college party even, in all meanings of the word.  
  
When you were busy studying for your next exam, a little liver damage wasn’t much to worry about. Really little. Minor. Miniscule. Pretty much nonexistent… Some. Hunterwise, it didn’t really matter. We tended not to live that long anyway.  
  
Yeah, I know that sounded bad… But this was the energy drink market. What did you expect? That it didn’t gradually sterilize or give you a stroke when left out in the sun for too long was a high bar. Also, livers grow back. If you try chugging five cans a day and fuck it up, that’s on you, you absolute animal. It was on the warning label and everything. It wasn’t the drink’s fault you couldn’t read. Torchquick was as entirely legitimate and ‘safe’ as an energy drink could be; approved by the VFD association and that was that.  
  
And, no. I wasn’t being defensive. That the formula kinda had my name and the sweat of my brow (more from the tumble I took with Neo before deciding the original tasted like shit than effort on my part) on it didn’t apply here. This was the truth and nothing but the truth. Fuck you.  
  
Okay. So, just to clarify… Today had been a good one for Team Yang Bang. The last few days had been good for Team Yang Bang, really. After movie night, things had gotten _better_. Our interactions weren’t exactly perfect, not yet, not even close, but Blake had stopped eyeing Weiss’ neck when she thought no one was looking. Weiss’ fingers had stopped twitching towards her right hip whenever she saw me and that eye tic had disappeared.  
  
Jaune was still Jaune, but I hadn’t been expecting much on that front. A lifetime of being, to be kind, _himself_ wasn’t going to change overnight. I’d give him a month or something; soften him up before I threw the twins at him. I’d owe both of them a favor, which would suck, but they were at a level that Jaune could _reach_ before the end of the year. They’d be a hell of a lot closer than the glass ceiling that was moi and it would, hopefully, keep him from curling up and dying after his hundredth beating.  
  
Maybe it would be good for him? Give him some real confidence to back up that acting he was into… Miltia had always been into broken birds. Lil’ Miss too, from what I’d heard… In a son-in-law sort of way. I’d never met the woman myself, thank God, but Jaune would appeal to her if only because Miltia or, god forbid, _Melanie_ would never have a problem when it came to handling him.  
  
… I might have to rethink this. Dropping Jaune into that mess might be cruel. Cruel, and possibly lethal. Crap. Even now, he continued to block me at every turn. Curses.  
  
Whistling to myself to push away the crushing depression that came with an impossible project with no end in sight, I weaved through the evening crowds and towards my final destination for the day. The beat of my feet on familiar streets; feeling musical and rhythmical, like a real bard thanks to the dull hum of heavy bass behind well-insulated walls and the murmur of a line well on its way to circling around the block.  
  
It looked like Team Yang Bang wasn’t the only one having a good day. I had to wonder how Junior was able to keep up, what with him being the only bartender. Wonder, and never receive an answer other than ‘secrets of the trade’... Right. I still owed him money. Dick. I swear, everyone I know is a total asshole.  
  
What that said about me was best not thought about. That would mean introspection and self-reflection and this wasn’t the right place for that. That junk was for smoky bars with a tiny TV playing sports in the corner, not bumping clubs full of men with snappy, if cheap and mass-produced, suits.  
  
That was another thing I had to wonder about. I knew Junior’s suit was bespoke, because of course it was, but where did all the others come from? The guys that worked for him, the rank and file, barely had a nickle to rub together, let alone money for actual _clothes_. Had there been a clearance sale at the local costume store that I’d missed? Were the suits even cheaper than I’d thought they were? What _rack_ had a hundred black suits, red ties, and red shades come off of?  
  
These were the questions that kept me up at night. That, and why we weren’t being constantly bombarded by moon bits. That was some serious shit. Not present shit, sure, but I was still half-way expecting that to happen any day now… Not today though. Not right now as I skipped past the long, long line of people waiting to get inside. The customary protests and jeers and demands to get in line like the rest of them and stop being a total bitch washing over my back; the bouncer unclipping the rope and ushering me through made them louder, but just as impotent.  
  
I owed the big man inside more money than most of the people outside had ever seen in their lives. Also, I kind of knew him. That got me some leeway, admittedly...but it wasn’t like Junior didn’t have VIP cards. If they wanted in before midnight, they could shell out like everyone else. It wasn’t hard to do.  
  
Just don’t come to the Club for a couple months. Save up. Stop doing that instant-gratification shit, blowing your money on the door charge and expensive drinks, and come back when you had your shit together. If you didn’t have the money to burn in the first place, then why the hell were you here?  
  
Junior was pretty fair about financial stuff, even for something as small as that. Better than a bank, was Junior. A real gentleman. I only had to worry about him threatening my kneecaps and not my unpaid mortgage and credit score, all friendly like. He was a lot more honest, direct, and the damage he caused was a hell of a lot easier to fix. For a given value of ‘easier’.  
  
He didn’t foreclose on someone’s ability to walk without a reason. That was good enough for me. What it said when I’d rather talk to gang bosses than bank executives, didn’t need saying… Also, wow. Monochrome seemed to be the hip thing on the nightclub scene right now. Black, white, enough flashing lights to kill a thousand epileptics. You know, the usual.  
  
The twins were good at staying ahead of the trends. There was no doubt about that... It didn’t mean that I had to like the color scheme though and, so, I wouldn’t.  
  
A quick hop down the staircase, avoiding the sweaty dancing crowd on the dance floor and I’d snaked my way to the bar with Junior’s minions; giving me the side eye and a wave here and there. When it came to me, their opinions were mixed. On one hand, I’d been a pretty decent boss while we’d worked together. I hadn’t thrown them into shit they couldn’t handle, blamed them for my own personal fuckups, and I’d paid them on time. On the other, I’d effectively made them expendable mercenaries in a really stupid shadow war against the total psychopath I slept with on the semi-regular.  
  
She hadn’t hurt any of them _permanently_ , if only because Roman wouldn’t have been happy that his primary source of cheap muscle had lost some numbers, but she hadn’t been all that gentle either. Getting hurt was one thing in their line of work. Expected, really...but they had their pride. A tiff between two people over something as dumb (don’t let Neo hear you say that) as _ice cream_ had wounded it.  
  
Some of them would never forgive me… The rest thought it had been fucking hilarious and an easy paycheck. Totally worth it.  
  
“So you finally decided to hire some help, huh?” Were the first words out of my mouth as I took a lean on the bar and gave it an expansive wave. Where there had only been a very unimpressed Junior, now there were four others. All of them young. All of them hip. All of them looking like they made artisanal lattes for a living instead of giving out cheap drinks with some acrobatics. Cute. “Got something you’re trying to hide?”  
  
Junior’s stare was entirely flat as he cleaned out the inside of a cup with a glaringly white rag.  
  
“Ah. I see. The club life has caught up with you.” I looked out at the crowd real quick, then back. “You’re losing your hearing and getting on in years; that vitality of youth.” A rap of the knuckles against the bar had a drink appearing in front of me like it was magic, slid down the bar with eerie precision. “Maybe you should think of retiring before your back gives out. Get out while the getting is good, old man, before your withered old husk starts reminding us young people of our mortality.”  
  
We had fun.  
  
“That’ll be five-hundred lein,” was Junior’s gruff reply, my hand clapping down over my heart before he’d even finished talking. “Why are you here, Yang?”  
  
“Oh, come on, man. Live a little. Give me some sass, some basic politeness. No ‘how are you’ or ‘how was your day’ at least? Really?” Five-hundred in exact change found itself in his bear-like mitts and under the counter, this song and dance more a matter of habit than an obligation. “You’d think that you weren’t happy to see me.”  
  
“You know why, Xiao-Long.”  
  
I took a sip of my soda, some Menagerian export that had a certain _zing_ to it that I hadn’t been able to find anywhere else. Like...like what I remembered from Pepsi with a touch of pineapple, but not really? I couldn’t explain the taste, not even to myself, but ‘Red Claw’ was nice to have when it came in anyway. “That happened forever ago, Junior. Come on. It's not like I’m stiffing you, clearly.”  
  
“That drink of yours isn’t exactly cheap.” He put down his glass and picked up another one to wipe into a glaring shine. “To buy or to transport. Menagerie isn’t exactly a world famous trading den.”  
  
“I really doubt it's five-hundred lein a glass expensive but, sure. Whatever you say and true enough.” I took a sip and enjoyed that tingling, carbonated _burn_ for a second. “Also, if you wanna know what I’m doing here, I’m waiting for Neo. I’ve got an appointment.”  
  
Against all common decency or sense, he relaxed. His shoulders untensed, his teeth stopped grinding… Dick. Everyone I knew. Dicks. “Oh?”  
  
“I don’t consider Neo not being within five feet of me an invitation to seduce the twins, Xiong. We’ve talked about this.”  
  
His response, pointing at his eyes and then pointing at me, was real heartwarming.  
  
“Fuck you too then.” I flipped him off for extra emphasis as I swung my ass into a bar stool. This standing shit was for the birds. “You’re lucky I’m such a nice girl or you’d be regretting that so hard…” Also, Lil’ Miss hanging over us both like a purple, overweight shroud. With Neo, all I had to worry about was my sudden and violent murder. With Lil’ Miss, I’d be lucky if she just started asking for protection money after burning my house to the ground as soon as she learned I wasn’t looking to tie myself down to her little girls. Priorities. “I gotta ask though, I thought you’d gone legit?”  
  
We both knew that was bullshit, but it was a decent enough opener for what I wanted to ask.  
  
“Of course I have and of course I am,” He said with the consummate ease of a professional liar. “I am an upstanding citizen and pillar of the community. I’ve never been anything else and I am offended by your accusation.”  
  
“Ah, right. I forgot. Sorry. I must have been thinking of another Hei Xiong. Silly me.” I took another gulp of my drink, already halfway down. “I guess I won’t be asking you about whether you hooked a blonde kid up with some Hunting School transcripts then, seeing as you didn’t do it.”  
  
He actually stopped cleaning at that. “No. Even if I wasn’t an upstanding member of society, I wouldn’t do that without some serious incentive. The amount of security checks you’d need to handle are insane. You would have to be desperate, even more insane than the checks, just that good, or any combination of the three to even think about it.” He grimaced. “Beacon might be the most accepting of the Academies, but they use the same algorithms as Atlas and the same sort of response. I wouldn’t want to be the person who tried.”  
  
“Having the local Headmaster knocking on your door would be pretty awkward,” I agreed, my worldview lightly shaken and not stirred. Wherever Jaune had got his papers, it hadn’t been in Vale. If it had gotten past freaking _Ozpin_ , that meant that his transcripts must have been damn near immaculate. “Still though, you know anyone who could?”  
  
“Not really. Not personally.” His brows furrowed in thoughtful concern. “Probably some of those old Mantle hardliner remnants, if anyone.”  
  
“God damn it. Really? Are you kidding?” I clunked down my glass and passed it to him for a refill. “We’re thinking about the same people, right? Mantle will rise again?”  
  
“Not all of them are illiterate, gun-toting colonials. You know better than that.” He grimaced some more, but _harder_. “Not all of their scientists and leadership got folded into Atlas at the end, or found their way into a jail cell, and Atlas’ digital security hasn’t exactly changed all that much since then. I have no idea how easy it would be to change some numbers around, but it would be a lot easier for them to do it than it would be for anyone else.”  
  
“They haven’t _needed_ to change much.” I nodded and rolled my eyes. I really doubted that Jaune had got it from those guys but, knowing what I did about him, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he’d tried. Good ideas weren’t his specialty… And look at the rest of us helpless primitives, living in our mud huts and fishing with spears. Ungan chunga. “Us kids in Vale haven’t exactly had any tech revolutions that didn’t involve mechashift or scrolls lately, have we?”  
  
He chuckled, and that was when I suddenly found myself as the subject of a surprise examination. A goosing, really. Arm around my middle and a disturbingly cold hand giving my package a squeeze through my pants. Then another squeeze somewhere else down the line. The only thing missing here was a request for me to cough.  
  
“It looks like your date is here,” Hei observed before he moved down the line and away. “Nice talking to you, Yang.”  
  
“Right back at you, Junior. Have a good one.” I chugged the rest of my drink down and pretended that, even while I was getting fondled in one of the most clinical manners I’d ever been subjected to, everything was completely normal. A little hard to do, considering, but I did it. “Hey, Neo. Nice to see you too.”  
  
Peeking her head around my side, which was a near thing thanks to the stool I was on, she gave me the stink eye; hair black and eyes a glaring shade of green. If there was one thing that Neo was good at, it was opsec and subtlety...when she tried. And, no. Not just because she was mute.  
  
That helped, but it wasn’t just that.  
  
Publically tying her to me, and vice versa, wouldn’t be a good thing for either of us. She was trying to stay on the down low as Roman’s Ace, and I was just trying not to get looked at as someone of interest when someone eventually got a picture of her to spread around. For all anyone around us knew, anyone that wasn’t in the know, this tiny woman in gothic frills had just saw someone she’d liked and gone for it.  
  
That happened a lot in places like this. Nothing to blink at unless we started fucking on the dance floor. We were as good as anonymous, just how I liked it…and that groping was starting to get aggressive. I think I might have felt a nail.  
  
“It still works, Neo. You could have just asked.” I spun around on my stool and hopped off, forcing Neo to let me go and back off unless she wanted to get scraped off against the edge of the bar counter. “Keep using it like a squeeze ball though, and I’m going to have to wonder if you’re angry with me.”  
  
She pouted and, as I looked at her, I found myself nearly overcome with a heavy urge to squint. Against the black-and-white backdrop of the club, she damn near blended into it. It was almost like I was going snowblind or looking at a magic picture with a dash of green at the top, and I doubted it hadn’t been on purpose.  
  
“Are you trying to give me a stroke?” I blinked. Hard. It didn’t help. “Because this is how you give someone a stroke. That, or angry sex. Lots of angry sex.”  
  
I didn’t need to see her to know she was laughing at me. She could have chosen a hundred other disguises, but this was the one she went with. Of course she’d done it on purpose.  
  
“Fine. Angry sex it is then.” I huffed, spun her around, and put both my hands on her shoulders so that I could start pushing her towards - anywhere. Somewhere I wouldn’t feel like I’d just fallen into an old-timey movie reel where I was the only source of color… I might have been overreacting. “If we’re going dancing, it isn’t here though. I’m telling you now.”  
  
I could feel her ‘hair’ (illusions my ass) as she shook her head.  
  
“Don’t you test me, Neo. I might have gone a week completely dry, but I have my limits.” Having vertigo and losing my lunch was one of those limits.  
  
She shook her head again and, instead of allowing me to keep on pushing her, started _leading_. To the side and away from the crowds, towards yet another set of ropes and brass; The VIP rooms. That sounded - not perfect, but better. As long as the color scheme stayed down here, I’d be happy.  
  
Passing through this checkpoint was even easier than the first, the workers here continuing their trend of being absolutely helpful where I was concerned and letting us through without a word… The color scheme, as we walked down the hall, instantly became something sensible and nothing that would make my eyes dribble down my face. Beautiful.  
  
Even now that things were better, I kept my hands on the tiny woman in my grip. Fingers along her arm, my palm in the crook of her neck; examples. Polite, reasonable examples that wasn’t me breaking the illusion entirely with a pinch or a smack to hurry her along.  
  
She wasn’t the only one that was feeling impatient. I was just better about expressing it and waiting until the time was right. We passed room after room. The ‘VIP’ rooms that Junior lent out to stupid kids that wanted to feel important for the night. The VIP rooms that he lent out when he actually liked you or couldn’t offend you. All the way to the _VIP_ rooms that he used for his ‘perfectly legitimate business transactions’.  
  
Those were the best rooms in the house and, if everything went well, I was going to be owing him some more money in cleaning fees… Jeeze. If he’d been an actual bank, my credit would have been _amazing_. Better than the room we were in, if not by much.  
  
It was obvious that this room had been from one of the many previous design choices of the nightclub; That being the nature of the beast and all that. As I’d said to myself before, if it wasn’t for the Twins, Junior would have been a lost cause and he knew it.  
  
The man hadn’t even known that people liked _grapes_. **_Grapes_**. Without M&M, he’d have been out of business long ago… Back to the room. Unlike the rest of the club, there was some actual color to it. A deep blue, with tastefully done dim lighting. I think. I was sort of flashblind at the moment, so that might have been it, and I really should get some sunglasses of my own, just so that I could deal with things like this.  
  
Flashbangs existed. Those didn’t sound like much fun either.  
  
I gently sat down onto the couch, relaxing into the soft blue velvet...and I resolved not to stain it too much if I could help it. No wonder Junior hadn’t updated this room. I’d keep this couch until the day it disintegrated if I had the choice.  
  
The desk was fair game though. And that wall over there. And that carpet. Neo liked being tossed around and, by god, I was going to toss the everloving _shit_ out of her tonight… If she didn’t want to get tossed, maybe she shouldn’t have been so small then? Also, maybe she shouldn’t have started pulling at my belt as soon as I’d found a seat.  
  
Just a thought.  
  
“Someone’s hungry,” I teased with good cheer as I slapped her hand away, the sound of shattering glass and the reveal of her true form her response. “Did you miss me that much, huh? Did you miss getting fucked silly by little ol’ me?”  
  
The scowl that crossed her face at my question, or at being denied if even momentarily, was impressive. Murderous even, and only getting worse as I caught her chin between thumb and forefinger.  
  
“We could have danced. Had drinks. Made some conversation before you went to get me naked, just like I offered,” I crooned, no longer sweet as I capitalized on her mistake - showing weakness in front of me - and went right for the kill. “But, no. We couldn’t do that, now could we? Hungry little Neo needs to have every thought in her pretty little head fucked right out, right now, doesn’t she?”  
  
She’d do the same to me if our positions were reversed. I knew it. She knew it. This was how we worked. Was it fucked up? Maybe just a little. But who wasn’t? And at least it was never boring.  
  
Her response to my teasing was perfectly measured and rational, as was only to be expected; She tried to bite my fingers. Failed miserably as her quick jerk to get out of my grasp led to nothing but her biting down on air with a painful-sounding _click_... What was with short girls and them trying to turn me into a chew toy?  
  
“Nuh-uh. No biting.” A tap on the nose stunned her, just me having done it at all having confused her. Getting treated like an actual dog tended to do that. “Bad, Neo. Bad. You got your roles mixed up.” I stood with her face still in my hand, my time on the couch woefully over as I looked down on her, the differences between our heights as drastic as it ever was. It wasn’t as if I’d checked, but if she wasn’t more than a foot shorter then me than I was a nun. “I do all the biting here. _I’m_ going to eat you right up.”  
  
She stopped struggling, her eyes cycling through brown, pink and white as she found herself conflicted. On one hand, she could bite me and get herself some of that short lived high that came with disproportionate revenge. On the other hand, I was promising that dicking that she’d (we’d, let's be honest) been waiting an entire week for, all patient like, if she stopped with the attempted cannibalism.  
  
A hard choice. One that I helped her make as that hand on her chin moved down to her neck, my fingers wrapping easily around her throat. I could feel her pulse pick up in real time, see the pink rise up in her cheeks as the cycling of her eyes slowed; settled on light red with tiny flickers of white.  
  
Someone was excited.  
  
“I guess we aren’t going to be breaking a bed tonight. That’s a real shame. A real, real shame.” Neo didn’t even try to fight me when I added a touch of upwards pressure, getting her up on her tiptoes with a soundless gasp. Just enough to get the blood going and breath short, but not enough to do anything _real_. That was a hard line to walk, but I liked to believe I had some damned good balance. “But I think we can find something in here that’ll do as well, don’t you?”  
  
The minor struggling that started when I picked her up wasn’t much of a struggle at all. Just her going through the motions, her kicks and slaps easily ignored and deflected; if she’d wanted out, she’d have got out and there would have been nothing gentle about it… If she’d wanted out, I’d have been trying to keep her from dislocating something important. Something like my spine.  
  
I kind of needed that. Knowing how to read Neo’s moods had been more of a life skill, as I sort of needed it to keep my life, than anything else. Yet another thing I thought I was pretty good at.  
  
_Knew_ I was pretty good at when, after sweeping everything off of the room’s desk with a wave of the arm, I dropped Neo onto it, face first; hips already doing little figure eights in my direction even as I pinned her down, my hand a crushing weight at the back of her head as I unbuckled my pants and let gravity take them.  
  
“This baby is solid wood. Oak, through and through. A real piece of work.” I found myself somewhat surprised that, for once, her customary outfit wasn’t an illusion. The catch of her belt when I made to rip it off her, momentary as it was, clued me in as such. Also, the lack of glass breaking… If she didn’t have a change of clothes nearby, someone was going to be going home naked tonight. “I’m going to put that fat ass of yours right through it in record time, meat, see if I don’t.”  
  
Her pants now much the worse for wear as I discarded them, Neo bristled. Complained in that way only Neo could have as a still booted foot scraped against my shin and she, rather unconvincingly, tried to force her head up and off the desk as I pulled her leotard to the side; right over the better part of her rear with a noticeably wet spot on the crotch and a wet and ready _schilick._  
  
So small. So helpless. So ‘oh, woe is me, won’t someone save me from this lusty brute’. Welcome to the theater, folks. Drinks have a one refill limit and enjoy the show.  
  
Keeping her pinned to the desk with one arm, the muscles in my arm straining into stark relief for effect, I shucked my final cover; my underwear. Compressive spandex that looked like it had been about to give up the ghost as well. It took longer than either of us would have liked, judging by Neo’s sudden squirming, a good slap across the butt all that was needed to calm her down.  
  
Calm. Not submit. If I wanted that to happen, I was going to get a _lot_ more extreme. More than I was comfortable with, really, even if this wasn’t exactly going to be a walk in the park as it was. Our sexual compatibility, great as it was, only went so far.  
  
I prodded her entrance with the tip of my cock and tried not to shudder. Shiver, quiver, whatever. After the week of complete abstinence I’d forced on myself, I was sensitive. More than sensitive as I eased myself into her, Neo’s tiny body accepting me, welcoming me home without complaint or issue while a quake ran down from her head to her feet; the closest Neo could get to a scream.  
  
“Oh, _shit_.” I bit my lower lip and let out a deep breath through my nose, suddenly feeling just a touch soppy; breaking character. “I missed you too, Neo.”  
  
She was wet. Ready. Willing and so goddamned _tight_ … Being a Huntress, having the training, had its benefits. Not sticking it in crazy had never been so _hard_.  
  
Gripping the edge of the desk with my spare hand to get some bracing real quick, I rammed it in. Switched from easing to burying myself hilt-deep, the sensation more than enough to make me briefly whiteout; her inner walls twining, pulling at my erection as if they were trying to milk me dry...and almost getting it right then and there.  
  
_Really sensitive.  
_  
Withdrawing was even harder than getting in had been. Instead of pulling me deeper, Neo tried to pull me _back_. Same motions, same reasons, different scenario as her pussy lips tugged and pulled at every vein and ridge on my dick to keep me from escaping her grip… She didn’t succeed, even if it was a very near thing.  
  
I didn’t want to pull out. Simple as that. It might have just been the moment talking, but that didn’t change how I felt. If I could have, I’d have stayed inside of her forever. Gone through life with her around me, nice and snug and taking my load whenever and wherever I decided to give it… It was a good thought. One that made me wonder where I could find a trenchcoat big enough to hide her as I went about my day.  
  
It wasn’t an entirely coherent thought, thanks to the pressure already building up in my balls, begging to be vented into the hole it had been meant for. Greater individuals than I had been unable to resist this particular call…and I had no reason to hold back in any capacity.  
  
The spirit was willing. The flesh was weak. The pipes needed clearing and I made no apologies for it as pounded Neo’s ass with a worksman-like pace, the soft meat of her rear rippling like water during a quake even as I shot the first load of many that night; Eyelids flickered, teeth ground against teeth, and Neo’s insides became decidedly more _sloppy_ and _warm_ and _wet_.  
  
It took two seconds for sperm to come bubbling out of her like someone had just popped off a papier-mache volcano. Three seconds to add yet more to my debt as an off-white, near-solid river stained the carpet below us in a lightly steaming puddle. None at all for me to get back to fucking Neo stupid, having never stopped at all.  
  
I wasn’t done. Not even close. I’d just solved a problem I had and moved past it in the most direct manner possible, was all. It wasn’t the first time I’d some something like this, and it definitely wouldn’t be the last.  
  
When the pipes had to be cleared, they had to be cleared. Nature’s call had to be answered and that was that. One and done was for the weak and Aura was pretty fucking great for that sort of thing...and so here we were. With me in character, ‘using’ Neo as a dumping ground for my sperm with little thought as to her pleasure. With Neo shivering like a plucked guitar string, hands over the farthest edge of the desk in front of her and hanging on for dear life while, instead of slowing down, I just about hollowed her out.  
  
I quit being gentle, for all that mattered. If not for me pinning Neo to the table I’d have pushed her off with how much force I put into every jackhammering thrust. Her ass bounced and pancaked with each stroke; my swinging nuts slapping against her clit and thighs in broken, animalistic rhythm that had the desk, easily three-hundred pounds if not four, alarmingly rocking forward on its legs.  
  
I wasn’t the vocal type. Neo was Neo. Even then, if not for the music going on a couple walls away, the whole building could have heard us… That was some damn good bass, I’d give them that.  
  
Forward and back. Back and forward. As quickly as I could give it to her without catapulting her into the opposite wall or into the plush blue weave at my feet. Enough to leave her aching and sore and depressingly _empty_ long after I’d finished… Even if it got tiring getting jumped at random times, knowing that I’d killed all the feeling in her legs for the day was good for my ego.  
  
Very.  
  
I soon had myself a fistful of her hair wrapped around a fist; her head rising off the desk for the first time in the last ten minutes so that I could hiss into her ear. Hard things. Cruel things. _Hot as hell_ things that had her squirting madly all over my dick without a pause. Slut. Bitch. Whore. Cock-hungry cumbucket. All that and _worse_ , the heated litany of insults I heaped upon her head flowing past my lips without thought or personal recognition.  
  
It was the act that mattered. Not the content. Grab her hair. Insult her, degrade her, _humiliate_ her. Treat her like she’s something you’d wipe off your shoe. That was how she liked it when we had the time to - indulge - and, after some practice, I’d eventually learned how to get it done.  
  
Our time together just before I’d joined Beacon had been us being _soft_. If I’d done or said most of the things I’d done or said then to anyone else, I’d have been paying for a taxi right then and there; not with Neo though. Never with Neo. She ate this shit up.  
  
_This girl was a total freak_.  
  
There was creaking everytime I slammed into her now, pulling her hair as I did so. The legs of her support was giving out, the tics and tiny crunches of stressed wood a subtle underlay to her desperate breathing and the splintering of the desk’s end under her fingers as it crumbled in the face of what she was bracing herself against.  
  
I couldn’t count how many times she’d gone over the edge into orgasm at this point. I hadn’t been counting at all but, knowing her, it was more than enough times to turn her into a boneless puddle only slightly bigger than the one we’d already made; One for every five insults I threw at her or less.  
  
She knew what she wanted. I knew how to give it. Our relationship in a nutshell.  
  
I pulled again, harder, effectively yanking at Neo’s leash hard enough to make her muscles tense up into stone, her mouth opening in a silent shriek; my teeth finding the side of her neck just above the pulse right then and there; the photo finish coming ever closer, the end nigh as one of the desk’s legs finally snapped and caused a reaction that took another two and damn near spilled Neo over the edge before I pushed my breasts into her back and added my weight.  
  
Thrown around. Battered. Bitten. Crushed. Every ecstatic, pained scream that left Neo’s mouth was one that I could feel through my teeth. One that I could taste, one that I could almost _hear_ as my vicious pounding turned into a bouncing grind and my body decided to say ‘ _fuck this refractory shit_ ’ and push me right back up to the top. Nuts aching, pressure building. Heart pounding and vision loss. The whole nine yards.  
  
That this was the only time I could imagine how Neo would sound like if she could talk was - weird. I didn’t know how to feel about that, mentally… My body had its own opinions on the matter and it wasn’t shy in showing it.  
  
Neo beat me to the finish line here, her vaginal walls squeezing my shaft like they were trying to break it in half in her strongest orgasm yet that day.  
  
I continued to fuck her through it, of course. To push it higher, longer; not all that far behind her as I let loose once more with a humming growl...and it just didn’t end. My balls jumped up close to my body and did their work on overtime, every shot of cum fired into Neo’s body felt as if it were dragging away a piece of my soul with it. Ribbons. Streams. Now that the blockage was gone I was a goddamn firehose on full blast, its tanks getting pumped of every last drop they had in them.  
  
From that point on, I just focused on working it out. Going until I was completely dry while leaving a mark on Neo’s neck that would last for the rest of the month if not longer… Possessive. Her illusions would hide it from everyone else, but she’d know it was there. I’d know it was there… Just another part of the play.  
  
I sucked in a breath and, against my every instinct, I _yanked_ myself out of Neo’s clenching hole and vented the last few shots over her back. Stained that leotard of hers in a messy line right down the middle of her back before I pulled her up with me...and she looked so _small_. Just holding her like this, by the back of her neck so that she could hang in the air and slowly drain on the floor, rubbed it in; body limp, eyes a teary chocolate in the middle of an expanse made of ruined makeup and spit… There might have been a time that I’d have felt sorry for her. Worried if I’d gone too far.  
  
Might have been. Once. Never again.  
  
Too bad I knew that she was having the time of her life. Fool me once… I wasn’t getting a ribbon tied around my dick today. No fucking way. It might have been blue and with a big number one on it, which was nice, but blue balls _hurts_ … I suspected that was the entire point of why she did it.  
  
The last leg of the desk snapped on its own, the doing of making a sound like a gunshot as the greater part fell to the floor on jagged stumps.  
  
Well, as long as I was on top.  
  
“Is this what you wanted, meat?” I sneered and gave her a shake that had her legs flopping. “Is this what you were looking for?”  
  
Neo looked at me with watery eyes. Sniffled...and raised both hands to give me double peace signs, both of her eyes filling up with a giant pink heart the next time she blinked.  
  
“You cheeky little shit.”  
  
She ‘nodded’ happily at me, the set of her body instantly transforming from ‘cowed and brutalized’ to ‘infuriatingly smug’. She also peace signed at me harder by pushing them into my face, or close enough.  
  
Write a sex scene for the publisher where that happened once, just once, and they’d never let you forget it… I really should have known better.  
  
**_That's on me._**

 

 

 


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Just a little addition to chapter 8! The one where Yang sets up movie night! That one! You know the one!
> 
> Sorry for the wait, but I'm here now!

“Friends, buddies, pals. Lend me your ears. Hearken to mine words.” Yang’s eyes glittered eerily in the light; the glow of the TV screen reflecting off the bottle between them all as the credits played. “Dost thou feel lucky, knaves? Dost thou?”  
  
“Uhhh…?” Jaune rubbed the back of his neck as his fellow blonde gave the bottle’s tip a flick, rotating it a full ninety degrees as he looked between them all and began to sweat. Visibly. As the only guy in the group, the bent of his thoughts was obvious. “Maybe?”  
  
“I thought this may come up.” Blake sighed and hugged the pillow between her legs a little harder. She loved her sleepwear, don’t get her wrong, but it had become a liability recently. Just taking a seat in them stretched her modesty to the limit. She might not have cared much about it, but she still had some. “I’ll be opting out of the customary prize.”  
  
Yang pursed her lips but accepted that with an easy nod… Odd. Blake had had the idea that the blonde didn’t know what brakes were for a while now. That she didn’t press was good, don’t get her wrong, but it was surprising. “That’s fair. Truth-or-dare for you then?”  
  
Blake shrugged, the shoulder of her yukata sliding slightly down before she pulled it back up. “Sure.”  
  
It wasn’t as if she was being interrogated. Schnee or not, Hunters or not, these were just a bunch of schoolkids. She could handle anything they threw at her.  
  
“I have no idea what this is. What are we doing? What are you talking about?” Weiss said, as expected. No matter her bluster about her experience with sleepovers, none of her reactions so far had backed those claims up. Blake had been living in the wilds with a bunch of freedom fighters for the last decade and even she knew what spin-the-bottle was. What was her excuse? “Why should whether I feel lucky or not matter?”  
  
“... Okay, I should have seen this one coming. I blame the scotch and whiskey triple ripple.” Yang smacked her lips as Weiss let out a loud ‘hey’... Also, scotch and whiskey ice cream? Where had _that_ been, _how_ had Yang found it, and _why_ was that even a thing? That sounded like something someone would do to pretend they didn’t have a problem, only to make the problem obvious to everyone who asked. “So, for those of us who have never had a childhood, this is a time-honored sleepover tradition.”  
  
There was an excited, extended squeaking noise when Yang put her hand on the bottle. It didn’t take much time or effort to figure out it had come from Jaune and, so no one bothered to comment. Too much effort to spend on something so small.  
  
Jaune wasn’t a bad guy, and Blake didn’t dislike him in small doses, but Yang had the right of it. He needed to man up. A lot. Anything else she had to say on the matter had to be out loud, which she wasn’t going to do.  
  
Tact was a thing she possessed when she wanted it. Yang didn’t need any help in crushing his ego and Blake suspected she never would. The Faunus had seen drill sergeants that had been softer on their recruits than Yang was on him; Blake approved.  
  
If he was going to be her partner, he needed to be less - him.  
  
“This game is known as spin-the-bottle. A game of luck for civilians. A game of skill for Hunters.” Yang set the bottle to spinning with a deft flick of the wrist, the glass running perfectly smooth on the carpet, bumps or not. “There aren’t many games better when it comes to bonding.”  
  
“How would it do that?” Weiss, who had leaned forward a little over far for someone that wasn’t interested, fell back on her heels, butt-first. “I mean, this sounds similar to something that I’ve done before with several acquaintances of mine. Of course, there are some minor differences, but…”  
  
Blake didn’t believe that for a second. Weiss couldn’t have been any more clueless about this without being Jaune. No. Worse than Jaune. Even he knew what they were up to and that was just _sad_.  
  
“Right. The spinning bit isn’t made out of hard light Dust crystals and coated in powdered silver. This was on short notice, so my party games butler found himself on the back foot.” Yang’s face was perfectly smooth as she said this, that grin of hers not changing even an inch when Weiss gave a commiserating, if reluctant, nod back. “It's so hard to find good help these days.”  
  
Weiss let out a put upon sigh. “It always is.”  
  
… Was she serious?  
  
“That isn’t important right now though. We can talk about our problems with the help later. What is important are the rules of the game.” Yang continued with another flick that upped the spin by an order of magnitude, the bottle now just a solid blur. Show off. “You spin the bottle.”  
  
“Yes?”  
  
“You spin this son-of-a-bitch as hard or soft as you want. Give it a turn. Do what you want as long as you keep it in the circle and you get one try. Just one...with a single exception that I shall explain if it ever comes up.” Yang held up a finger to impress this need, the concept of ‘one’, on the heiress and Blake’s natural enemy by default. “Once this baby starts spinning, there are no take-backs. Just consequences.”  
  
No one said anything as the bottle slowly, very slowly began to slow over the course of three minutes. It was - tense. Mostly. Jaune nearly shaking himself into another dimension detracted from the atmosphere.  
  
“The bottle has to stop on someone. Someone that isn’t the one to have spun it in the first place.”  
  
Blake frowned and pulled her pillow up higher on her chest, her ears twitching under her bow as it ground to a halt to point at her. It hadn’t stopped yet, but she was more than able to see how this was going to end.  
  
“And that’s when the games begin. When friendships are forged. When boys are turned into men and girls into women.” Yang sat up, her sleeping dress bunching up around her legs in a thick cotton puddle as she tapped a pair of fingers suggestively against her lips and shot Blake a quick wink. “All through a couple seconds of heaven.”  
  
“Or just some truth-or-dare.” Blake narrowed her eyes and wrinkled her nose at the blonde, getting nothing more than a carefree shrug and a raspberry in return. “Not everyone is comfortable with casual makeout sessions.”  
  
“Or just some truth-or-dare. Blake has the right of it,” Yang acknowledged while Jaune flushed and Weiss sounded out ‘casual makeout sessions’ to herself, bemused. The heiress might very well have never heard those words put together like that, or in that order...and, now, Blake was sorry that she’d said anything. Having Weiss find out what that meant the hard way would have made her year. “Spin the bottle isn’t for making people uncomfortable. Its to have fun and help with getting us to know each other better. “Allow me to demonstrate with something easy.” Yang cleared her throat as the bottle came to a stop in front of Blake, just as expected. “Truth or dare, Blake?”  
  
“Truth.” Once again, this wasn’t an interrogation. Blake had nothing to worry about. “Hit me.”  
  
“If you had to choose between being able to read and a limitless supply of fresh fish, what would you choose?”  
  
Blake rocked back, momentarily shaken and indecisive until she remembered that the question she’d just been fed was a hypothetical; not an actual question. “Excuse me?”  
  
“Reading or fish, Blake.” Yang didn’t blink. Not even once. “This shouldn’t be hard.”  
  
“... I’ll have to pass.” Blake huffed. “What kind of question is that? Ridiculous. You’re Ridiculous.”  
  
“An easy one, Blake. That’s what kind of question that was. Ridiculous was the entire point,” Yang said with the sort of drawl people used when they thought someone had just said something really dumb, making Blake bristle. “Alright. Let’s try again. Favorite color?”  
  
“Black,” Blake spat, glad that her turn was over and that she now had some time to reflect.  
  
Just like what Yang had said about her Semblance, and how her clones might have had very temporary souls before they vanished to wherever they went after she was done with them, this was going to keep her up at night. For at least a night. Two at most. Books or Anima tuna; what a cruel dilemma...  
  
“And there we go. That’s how you do it.” Yang, entirely oblivious as to Blake’s newly created and short-lived internal struggle, moved on. “You don’t have to be serious when you ask a question. You don’t have to be silly either. Just ask.”  
  
Weiss, with a hand to her chin as she gave the bottle a thoughtful look, replied with a quiet, “I see. What about these...dares, of yours? How do those work?”  
  
“Good question. For this one, we’ll just pretend that it was Jaune’s turn and I was the one that won the toss.” She fixed a frozen Jaune with a look, the set of her form changing from that of a lifelong slacker to what Blake could only call ‘Sienna at her most pissy’. Back straight, eyes slightly narrowed, her every muscle lined with a dangerous tension that could send a full cell scurrying to the frontlines rather than stand a single second longer in the presence of their leader. Pissy...and sort of creepy. “I choose dare.”  
  
“Uh… Kay?” Jaune licked his lips, his eyes moving about in his skull like a hunted rabbit’s as he looked for help that wasn’t there. Blake actively avoiding eye contact might have helped him realize this. “How about you - touch your nose?”  
  
Yang, with her lip curling disdainfully as she did so, held a finger;--a single pinkie finger that rose up to her face with unerring grace and poise to give her nose a prim little tap, right onto the end. “Weak.”  
  
It was one of the more - tense - moments of Blake’s life. For someone who’d handled more than a few pipe bombs in their lives, not all of them of the highest quality, that meant something… Did Yang have a personality disorder or something? That was a serious concern.  
  
Normal people didn’t act like that.  
  
What had come out of Yang’s mouth, with her body language as it was, had come out of her with all the force of a marshmallow. Blake knew how hard it was to separate how you acted from what you said, thanks to her background, but Yang had done it as easy as breathing. Like she’d been doing it all her life.  
  
… There was something there.  
  
“Please don’t hurt me.”  
  
Blake, if she looked, expected that she might see tears. More than expected. He wouldn’t be sobbing or anything, thankfully (that would have been awkward), but he’d proven himself to be more than a little weepy.  
  
Blake didn’t look though. Once again, he might expect help and she knew better than to attract attention when the Grimm were on the hunt. She couldn’t have survivor’s guilt if she was dead.  
  
"A bit of a cop-out there, Arc, but I guess we can't expect anything too daring in the beginning. You get a pass." Yang, Blake had no other word for it, _twisted_ ; transformed back to the bright-eyed firestarter she knew and tolerated before turning to look at Weiss. “We’ve got to ease into this before we get into the good stuff. Right, Weissy-poo?”   
  
“If that ever gets out to the press, I’ll sue you into the ground, Xiao-Long.”  
  
"Your turn." The bombshell let Weiss’ threat go without comment as the heiress took control of the bottle with obvious trepidation. With thumb and forefinger, as if she’d just caught hold of a live snake instead of a formerly full container of grape drink. “You’ve got this.”  
  
“Clearly.” Weiss, eyes closed, gave it a twist...and it had everyone backing away as the damn thing started spinning like a top and swerving with near laser-guided focus at everyone’s shins.  
  
Blake was gone and on the couch before the first revolution had even finished. Ilia had had much the same problem and pattern recognition was an important life skill. As in, important if you wanted to keep your life.  
  
“Shit! Watch it!” Yang backward combat rolled out of the area just as the bottle veered through where she’d been sitting with a _whoosh_ ; the end of a flail without its tether. Her modesty was only barely kept intact, and Blake could only put it up to luck. “I knew you’d try to kill me one day, Schnee, but I didn’t think it would be today!”  
  
“If I’d been trying to kill you, you’d know, dolt!”  
  
“I do know, damn it! I can see it happening! I’m not blind!”  
  
Jaune, being the slowest and least aware of them all, was the one to stop the bottle’s momentum with a yelp and a flash of Aura across both his knees… Blake had only one thing to say as their toy for the evening did cartwheels in the air and Jaune acted as if he’d just lost both his legs to a Schnee ‘Strikebreaker’ mine.  
  
… Grape Co. bottles were inordinately tough, by-the-by. Also, when it landed on the carpet to point directly and unerringly at Blake, possibly sentient.  
  
“Fucking _oof_.” Yang ran a hand over her forehead and flicked a hand to get rid of the imaginary sweat. “I haven’t seen my life flash before my eyes like that since the last time my uncle tried cooking something more complicated than toast. You should just switch out Myrtenaster for that thing, fill it with the Dust loadout of your choice, and become the terror of Grimm and Huntsmen everywhere.”  
  
Harsh, but fair.   
  
“Oh? Is that what I should do?” Weiss, with murder and embarrassment carved into every line on her face, reached out for the glass instrument of death. “Please, tell me more. I am always open to new ideas.”  
  
“Nuh-uh-uh.” Yang tutted. “You’re being rude, Weiss. I’m Yang. Not Blake. Yaaaang.”  
  
“I hate you so much.”  
  
Blake sighed. Luck wasn’t on her side today it seemed. “Truth.”  
  
“I-” Weiss blinked at the Faunus, then flushed. Her return back to the ground and off her feet after having jumped as high as the ceiling was a great deal more graceful than the blonde’s had been, not that it was hard to do. “Oh. Oh, yes. We were in the middle of something, weren’t we? … Truth, hm?”  
  
“Yes.”  
  
“And you won’t say anything but the truth, yes?”  
  
“It is sort of expected.”  
  
“I will hold you to that. There have been things about you I have been curious about. You have been cagey and I now believe it is time to put my curiosity to rest.” Weiss’ hand returned to her chin while Blake tensed, quietly more than ready to grab Gambol Shroud off her nightstand and jump out the window before anyone realized she was escaping. This could end - badly. “Where did you get that dress of yours?”  
  
… That hadn’t been anywhere near the top five things Blake had expected to come out of Weiss’ mouth. Something about how they’d known she was a Faunus all along had been more likely, right next to Yang telling Jaune to hold her down so that they could sell her back to her parents for a fat stack of Menagerian Lein at Weiss’ direction.  
  
She had a very healthy imagination. That that scenario had been a good, strong chunk of the book she was currently reading might have had some effect.  
  
“I have never seen that cut before. Neither do I recognize the style or material.” Weiss reached out and Blake was too stunned to move before the white-haired girl had a fold of Blake’s outfit between her fingers. “It looks spectacularly drafty.”  
  
Blake, carefully, extracted her sleeve out of the other girl’s grasp and took a breath. Then another. Then yet another for good fortune and to stop her heart from beating out of her chest. “I prefer to call it comfortable.”  
  
“It might be at that,” Weiss conceded with another look, “but, really. Where did you get it?”  
  
“It was a gift from...someone I knew.” Blake licked her lips and pushed away the hurt that came with that sentence. “I couldn’t say where they got it, but it’s a yukata, made with Mistralian spider silk.”  
  
All she could remember was that it had been painfully expensive, worth more than the entire cell’s budget... That Adam hadn’t paid for it had been a given at the time. And romantic.  
  
She regretted it now...but that didn’t change anything. It had happened and that was it… It was too nice to lose over something as vague as ‘morals’.  
  
“Mistralian… Spider silk you said?” Weiss nodded at Blake’s muttered ‘yes’. “I might have to ask Pyrrha for more details then. Thank you.”  
  
Blake, now free to breathe again, nodded back in return. “You’re welcome.”  
  
A loud clap had both of them jumping in place. Jumping, and glaring at a brightly smiling Yang as she slowly, and shamelessly separated her hands.  
  
“And, now, you’ve got a twentieth of the experiences required for a full childhood. I’m proud of you.” She clapped again and, this time, didn’t stop. “Congratulations.”  
  
Weiss, this time, held what she clearly and dearly wanted to say to herself. Smart. “I pass my duty onto you, Blake.”  
  
“... Of course.” Pillow dropping between her legs where it belonged, Blake scooted, gracefully, forward on her bottom until her goal was in easy reach. She was stuck now. No point in resisting… That she actually _wanted_ to see where this went was secondary. “Let the dice roll.”  
  
“Momma needs a new pair of shoes! Gods, don’t fail me now!” Yang loudly butt in as was the usual for her as their shiny roulette dial did its work. Spin, spin, spin again. “I’ve got my mortgage on the line!”  
  
They wouldn’t. Not if Blake had her way. Yang hadn’t been entirely incorrect when she’d said that this was a game of skill for Hunters. Of timing and the usage of _just_ enough force to get what you needed and not a single ounce more.  
  
She was good at that. She sort of had to be, seeing as she wasn’t a powerhouse. The right amount of force in the right place and time was her entire thing; child's play.  
  
Blake was starting to get a feel for the blonde’s personality, she thought. For what _might_ have been her actual personality, whatever that may be. She wasn’t entirely confident in that, but it was enough to know that her question would be answered if she played it right and Yang didn’t pick ‘dare’.  
  
Blake didn’t think she had to worry about that.  
  
“Oh, my! Oh, me and my stars!” Yang gasped, hands clasped over her heart; eyes sharp and smile sharper under an affected persona, an effective smokescreen. “So soon? So quick? My heart isn’t ready!”  
  
“Don’t worry about your heart,” Blake said dryly. “I’m more interested in your mind.”  
  
“Oh? Really?” Yang tittered and began fanning herself. “Aren’t you just the sweetest?”  
  
Yang couldn’t resist a spectacle. If there was a show, she had to make a go of being the center of it… They were all curious about what her Semblance was; the team, that was. They’d all asked Yang about it at some point or another, if separately, only to have her say ‘it's complicated’.  
  
Much as Blake disliked it, they were going to be, theoretically, spending the next four years together. A Semblance was a hand of cards that everyone had to lay on the table, just for the sake of cohesion and planning.  
  
Jaune didn’t count. Blake was pretty sure he didn’t have one. That, or knew what a Semblance was in the first place.  
  
Her partner’s claims as to otherwise weren’t convincing...but, if anyone knew what it meant to be an imposter…  
  
Anyway, there were pragmatic reasons to know what Yang could do. Plenty of those... If Blake was honest with herself, she was just curious. Really, really, curious. Why Yang needed an explosion-proof box room ate at her. Also, at her slowly fraying sanity.  
  
Sleeping next to what might very well be a bomb lab wasn’t conducive to a good night of sleep.  
  
“Yeah.” Blake sighed on the inside. Exasperation was a very real, very painful affliction. “I’m a real sugar cube.”  
  
So bad...but necessary.  
  
“Well, you’re in luck. This lady right here has always had a bit of a sweet tooth. Also, the ability to read subtext. You want to know something about me. That isn’t a surprise.” Yang puffed her chest up and stuck her nose cockily up into the air. “Ask away.”  
  
Bingo.  
  
“Alright then. This question has been a long time coming.”  
  
“Got a pair of F’s right here, honey, and I ain’t talking about a failing grade.” Yang’s chest puffed up even _further_ , her bust pushing out against the material of her nightdress in a way that had Weiss and Jaune making choking noises… Blake assumed it was for different reasons, but she could be wrong. “If you want to know how I got them, all I can say is healthy living, good food, and some really good genetics.”  
  
“... Thank you for volunteering that information.” Blake forced back her stress headache and tried again. “But that wasn’t the question.”  
  
“It wasn’t?”  
  
“No.”  
  
“Are you sure?”  
  
“Yes.”  
  
“... You’re no fun.”  
  
“For the sake of the team, I have to ask,” Blake ignored that last comment entirely (that had been going around lately), putting Yang back on a highly theoretical backfoot. “What is your Semblance?”  
  
“I was going to ask that too,” Jaune added from the side. “I’m glad that I didn’t even get to. Good job, partner.”  
  
“Thanks.”  
  
Yang’s gasp this time was soft. Her eyes teary and the hands to her chest now pressed against it to cover a very imaginary wound. “Et Tu, Jaune?” The golden-blonde turned to face Weiss...then moved right on by, the lack of mercy in her heart more than evident. “I am betrayed. Assailed at all sides, enemies at every turn.”  
  
… That sounded familiar.  
  
“Don’t you try to distract us with your nonsense, Xiao-Long,” Weiss’, her cheeks stained with more than just a hint of pink, no doubt realizing the same thing that Blake had as she pushed. “Don’t you try to distract us with those obscene lumps on your chest either, you deviant. We’re better than that and we will not be lead astray. Not this time.”  
  
Obscene? A single one of Yang’s breasts might have been the size of her head, but that was a little dramatic, wasn’t it? That must have been the envy talking.  
  
Jaune’s pectorals were bigger. And he barely _had_ any. It had to be said.  
  
Yang sucked an exaggerated breath in through her teeth. “You’re no fun. In fact, you’re the anti-fun. The enemy of fun. You’re like - some Atlesian infiltration bot from the future, sent to kill the entertainment industry for your Colour War Revisionist AI masters.”  
  
How did Yang _think_ of the stuff that came out of her mouth? Did she even think at all? … That had been kind of funny and she’d had to hide a chuckle, sure, but Blake meant what she’d said.  
  
“All we know at this point is that we could put you in an oven and you’d be perfectly fine.” Weiss huffed. “Forgive us if we want to know more.”  
  
“She doesn’t sweat either,” Jaune added his own input. “And did anyone notice that she was carrying a popcorn popper under her arm? The sort you’re supposed to put on a stove? A _working_ popper?”  
  
“We all noticed, Jaune,” Blake affirmed his observation as Yang’s head bounced between the three of them. “And none of us can forget how she hocked up a thousand-degree-loogie on one of the school plates, now can we?”  
  
“Okay, first off, I wouldn’t fit in an oven. Those things are _tiny_ ,” Yang defended herself. Nonsensically. “Second off, I _do_ sweat. Sometimes. It just takes a lot of effort and is mostly redundant...and let's not kid ourselves, you aren’t exactly a CrossFit workout, Boss.”  
  
“... You aren’t wrong.”  
  
“Third, yeah. That’s a part of my Semblance. Heat. That’s why you never see me within three feet of candy or ice cream unless I’m shoveling it in my face.” Yang crossed her arms over her chest with a pout. “Lastly, that wasn’t a ‘loogie’. The closest definition would be ‘organic phosphorus’. Totally different.”  
  
Weiss stiffened as if she’d just had another rod shoved up her butt, right next to the fifteen or so that were already there. Blake, not having _any_ experience with that sensation, might as well have been a jack-in-the-box with how quickly her slouch vanished. “ ** _That was_** **_what?_** ”  
  
“I had it under control from the start. I wouldn’t have dropped something like that in public otherwise.” Yang waved them off like she’d just said something completely normal, ignoring Weiss’ calls of that ‘not being the point’... Acting as if she hadn’t just admitted to releasing a highly volatile substance while they were within ten yards of other people. How Weiss knew about it was unknown. How Blake knew about it was self-explanatory. “As I’ve said before, my Semblance is complicated.”  
  
… Blake was a great deal more happy about not poking that triple-locked, dust-alloyed security chest in Yang’s half of the room. She still had her fingers attached and that was a good thing.  
  
“Screw it though. I guess you guys are right. I’ve been kind of a gigantic tease about all of this, haven’t I?” Yang took the end of one of her sleeves and rolled it up to her elbow. “Just give me a second and everything will be explained.”  
  
“A second?” Weiss asked, her voice tight and high; her entire face the splotchy red of fear-filled outrage. “For what?”  
  
“To set the scene. Or try.” Yang _glared_ at her hand like it had insulted her...something that wasn’t her mother. “Pulling up feelings stronger than vague annoyance and frustration on demand isn’t easy, alright?”  
  
“Are those necessary?”  
  
“... Not really. It just makes it easier. And more dramatic… There goes my easy street cred.” She sighed. “I would have looked so _cool_.”  
  
Yang said that word a lot. Blake wasn’t entirely sure that it meant what she thought it meant.  
  
“Don’t worry, Xiao-Long. Nothing you could have done would have impressed me anyway.”  
  
Yang, after working her jaw in stunned silence, blinked. “Okay.” She blinked again. “That did it. Thanks.”  
  
“Did wha-” Weiss (and everyone else) jumped back with a shriek when Yang’s arm went up like a bonfire. With an explosion of sparks. With a curling fireball burning a black stain into the ceiling as a wave of heat tightened her flesh and her eyeballs dried in their sockets… Somehow, by some unholy miracle, the carpet was untouched...and was that sandalwood? Had Yang been carrying _sandalwood_? “OH, MY GODS!”  
  
Jaune, understandably, just screeched incoherently, tossed open the door to the halls, and vanished into them at a hysterical sprint.  
  
Blake echoed the sentiment. Even if she ‘knew’ that Yang wasn’t hurt, it was a very different thing from ‘knowing’... People bursting into flames was normally a _very bad thing;_ The couch had a really broad back and was, as she’d expected, fireproof. Wonderful cover.  
  
“COWER, FOOLS! WEEP! TREMBLE IN FEAR AND KNOW YOUR PLACE BENEATH ME!” Yang boomed madly as a curtain of flame washed over her hair with an acidic _snap_ to add a tint of red; the nails on each hand noticeably grew before Blake’s eyes. Turned from nails to claws to talons and her pupils narrowed into reptilian slits... That mumu of hers wasn’t looking as funny as it used to all of a sudden. “YOU STAND BEFORE THE DRAGON OF VALE, AND THEY DEMAND TRIBUTE!”  
  
Yang had been right. It was an awe-inspiring sight, one that would be seared (haha) into her memory for the rest of Blake’s life… Along with what happened next.   
  
“I AM FIRE! I AM DEATH! I AM THE ENDER OF WORLDS! I AM-”  
  
Right as a hellish orange glow began to flare from deep within Yang’s throat to do.. _.something_ , Jaune came back; face twisted into a mask of terror but with a fire extinguisher in hand all the same. With the sort of hand movements that could have only come from long practice, Jaune yanked the safety pin, pulled the hose up and at a suddenly very quiet Yang’s horrified face, and pulled the trigger.  
  
Silence reigned now. All there was was the hissing of fire retardant foam crashing into a flailing blonde girl’s guttering, sputtering, retreating form; Jaune followed in grim lockstep, utterly merciless when she fell to the ground and started doing the last part of stop-drop-and-roll.   
  
Blake, against all common sense or reason, pulled out her scroll and switched to camera mode.  
  
“S-stop! Quit it!”  
  
Weiss, who had joined her behind the couch at some point, did the same.  
  
“Oh, god, it tastes like- pabbppl!”  
  
Faunus and Schnee. Schnee and Faunus. They connected. They bonded, a frame at a time.  
  
“Damn you, Aaaaaaaarc!”  
  
==========  
  
They’d be doing that every Thursday from now on.


	11. Chapter 11

  
Jaune was a man of many regrets.  
  
He was a man of just as many dreams and hopes, don’t get him wrong, but there were definitely some regrets in his life. Things that he’d done in the past, things that he’d done to make his dreams real, had caught up to his present… Caught up in the same way a runaway train caught up to that one dumb kid that had been playing on the tracks. Like that.  
  
… Oh, Gods. That hadn’t sounded like him at _all_. Train tracks? Kids? One of his greatest regrets was no longer content with destroying his body and was now after his very mind. His soul. The last and most important bastion of the last male Arc.  
  
It was almost all he had left. Pride didn’t actually have much stake anymore. Or independence for that matter. As soon as he’d passed initiation, all hope of such had gone out the window.  
  
“Come on, Boss. Get up, buddy. Up and at em, friendo. It was just a clap to the head,” Yang Xiao-Long’s voice boomed from just over his head, cutting right through the ringing in his left ear like an icepick as he was yanked up and onto his feet without even a how-do-you-do. He couldn’t help but stumble, to fumble his sword and shield while he waited for the vertigo to go away. “You’ll live. Come at me!”  
  
His status as team leader might as well have been a part of the dorm room’s carpet, seeing as everyone on his team was more than happy to walk all over it…and him. He couldn’t forget that. His butt still ached and there were a pair of prints on the back of one of his pants that were never going to come out.  
  
That was fine though. He’d had worse. He’d got over that before the hour was out. He’d picked himself up, dusted himself off, and made to try again. Everything going according to plan, he’d have gained the respect of his team before the month was out and he’d be well on the way to becoming a Hunter.  
  
It was the perfect plan. Flawless.  
  
There had been some steps missing between A to Z, but he’d been doing well enough, hadn’t he? He’d got into Beacon, hadn’t he? Doing stuff on the fly had worked for him so far and, as his dad liked to say, ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’. If anyone knew what they were talking about… Jaune was feeling mighty broke right now though.  
  
He’d never had his ears clapped before. Not like _that_. The people in the movies really undersold how much that hurt.  
  
Jaune blinked and tried not to vomit all over his shoes when his doubled vision snapped back into place. “Do I-” He burped and winced, the taste of ‘vanilla’ heavy on his breath. It was like chugging down _sawdust_. If that was what vanilla actually tasted like in reality, Jaune wanted to go back to dreaming. “Have to?”  
  
“No. No, I guess you don’t. You’re a grown man now, with grown man choices and grown man thoughts.” Yang cocked her head to the side at him, like a bird eyeing a particularly juicy worm that had had the misfortune of hanging around the sprinklers just as they turned on… The bird _wished_ its smile was so big. “I’ll just have to come to you though if that’s how it's going to be. Think about that for me real quick.”  
  
Jaune grimaced, weighed his options, then went on the advance with his sword raised, shield high, and mouth zipped closed. Talking wasn’t a free action. Neither was yelling. Or screaming expletives after you’d just recovered from a shot to the solar plexus.  
  
 _“Words ain’t free anymore, bucko. This is Hunter land. You gotta_ earn _them now.”_ That was lesson thirteen. Unofficially. The one between ‘keep moving’ and ‘go for the eyes’. If he wasn’t giving orders or stalling for time, he was just wasting air. Air he could be _breathing._  
  
Air was important. Really important. With all the running he’d been doing lately, and the aforementioned shots to the solar plexus, air had become something he could truly appreciate these days. It filled his _lungs_. It kept his heart beating and his feet moving.  
  
It kept his shoes from bursting into flames and the rest of him with it.  
  
Ever since Yang had shared her Semblance with her team ( _Dragon_? **_Really?_** ), she’d decided that meant she was going to have to put it to use in her everyday life. The fire, he meant. All of the fire.  
  
He _was_ a part of her everyday life. Following this train of thought down to the station could be done at a walking pace.  
  
Trains. Stations. What was with the trains?  
  
… She wasn’t cruel about it...or, at least, she’d said she wasn’t being cruel about it. Not entirely… Her perpetual smile hadn’t been all that reassuring. That no one seemed to think that what she was doing to him, waking him up at the crack of dawn to throw firecrackers of varying levels of strength at him until he hit the ground, exhausted, was _odd_ in any way implied - things.  
  
Ruby, when he’d asked about it, had just given him a _look_. So had the rest of her team. So had Blake and Weiss for that matter. It had been the same exact look. That look that said ‘I don’t understand the issue’ that had only (mostly) gone away when he’d shifted the conversation to something else entirely.  
  
The difference between his old life and his new was like night and day.  
  
Being a Hunter was a lot different than he’d thought it was going to be… Gods, if he’d tried talking to his sisters about this they would have been horrified...or laughing. Laughing and horrified. It was a mix. It wouldn’t have been great.  
  
It would have _destroyed_ him.  
  
Also, Pyrrha was an absolute saint. Even if she didn’t understand where he was coming from, she tried to help anyway. Whenever he needed to get away, she was always there to give him a place to hide or someone to talk to.  
  
She was, without a doubt, his best friend. His bestest friend. Ever. Blake was going to have to work hard if she ever wanted to catch up.  
  
He wouldn’t hold his breath. Metaphorically. Or literally. He had to remember rule thirteen… Blake would come around. One day. Eventually.  
  
Partners were just friends with a different spelling, after all.  
  
It was only when Yang’s fist bopped him in the nose that he realized he’d been standing in place, in battle ready stance (Yang hadn’t been all that impressed with it, but it was what it was), for the last ten seconds.  
  
“Boom! Headshot!”  
  
Yang was punctual like that...and he might have had a concussion. Again.  
  
He wasn’t normally this dreamy. Really.  
  
==========  
  
I might have pushed Jaune too hard today. I didn’t think that often, or at all (he deserved everything he got), but I might have pushed him too hard today.  
  
To repeat myself into redundancy, I _might_ have pushed him too hard today.  
  
He could barely keep his head up in class. It would drop, he’d make sleeping noises, then he’d snap back awake only to do it all over again… Aura made up for a multitude of sins, but it didn’t cover all of them; The sin, in this case, being mental and emotional exhaustion, he was shit out of luck.  
  
I’m sure that there was a holy text out there that would back me up here. Thou shalt not wake before ten, or something profound like that. I’d dig it.  
  
Theology aside, while I was listening to Doctor (he insisted on that title) Oobleck ramble on about the Faunus wars and how stupid they were, I was busy tallying up Jaune’s progress. Despite, or maybe even because of his complete lack of training or sense, Jaune was actually getting places. Nowhere fast enough to bring him up to the rest of the team’s standard by the end of this year, definitely not even the next, but he was getting somewhere.  
  
I made sure to look busy as I doodled my thoughts out into my notebook. I knew about the Faunus Wars as good as anyone at my age could. It had been a shitshow all around... At the moment, looking busy so that I wouldn’t get called on was the name of the game.  
  
Jaune’s reaction time had visibly improved, going from abysmal to just painful to look at... That sounded harsh but I was grading on a curve that might as well have been at a ninety-degree angle. He’d fallen off the damn thing before he’d even begun and I was the poor sap that had to help him climb the hill.  
  
Flinching was a perfectly natural thing to do when something came at you. Thing is, that wasn’t going to stop an Ursa any. Another thing is, how are you supposed to protect your eyes when you couldn’t see the baby Nevermore trying to peck them out?  
  
Aura made shit like that useless… Uncle Qrow might have been an unapologetic drunk and, well, not entirely mentally _there_ (once again, drunk), but he’d had a point when he’d drummed that into our heads. Flinching was how civilians did things. Hunters _dodged._ Entirely different. You had to keep your eyes on the prize, that prize being the death of the thing that was trying to kill you.  
  
… He’d never quite gotten over being raised by bandits. It showed sometimes.  
  
I had thought I’d been going easy on him, going with a slightly more advanced version of Signal’s curriculum to account for his age...but I hadn’t accounted for him being completely, utterly _useless_ to start. Not completely. I’d known he was _bad_ , but… The prospect of switching up my schedule for him had been unappealing.  
  
Dark days were coming, like always, and, damn it, _he wasn’t ready_.  
  
I was torn out of my plans for the week by Professor Oobleck asking a question, one of those sudden shifts in conversation that draws your attention even if you weren't paying attention to it. It hadn’t been pointed at _me_ , thank the Brothers, but it was as close as one could get without going all the way.  
  
“Uh… The battle of Fort Castle?” Ruby looked down at her notes, no doubt sweating under her hood as she became the center of attention for the entire class. “The Faunus Wars one, right?”  
  
You could do it, Rubaby.  
  
“I don’t believe that there is a second Fort Castle, Miss Rose, or that there was a second battle after the Faunus were done with it,” Oobleck’s voice was like a machine gun, every word perfectly clear even as they ran into each other with all the grace of Ruby’s social skills… That had to be a Semblance. “So, yes. That Fort Castle.”  
  
“Oh. Okay. Fort Castle.” She flushed as a round of giggles went around the room. “It was… Well, first off, it was kind of a silly name for a Fort. Like, Fort Castle? What’s up with that? Was Castle Fort taken or something?”  
  
“It was an elaborate stockade mixed with an impromptu encampment,” the doctor clarified, complicating the matter even further with a tiny smile. “It was a morale issue and the name lightened the spirits of the men. They did what they could with what they had.”  
  
“Oh. Cool.” Ruby began spinning her pen in between her fingers, turning it into a circular blur powered by the nervous energy that only a fifteen-year-old could produce. “So, General Lagune. He was, like...a big shot, right?”  
  
“I’d think that a general would be what you would call a ‘big shot’, yes.”  
  
“Yeah. He, uh… He wasn’t very good at his job. Heck, he sucked at it.” Ruby’s pen stopped circling, then reversed direction as she licked her lips. “He didn’t know anything about the forces he was up against. Not even the basics. Like… Faunus have been around for a long time.”  
  
“Which is just too bad for the rest of us, huh? Goddamn animals...”  
  
“Mr. Winchester! Your input was unasked and uncalled for!” Oobleck snapped off to the side at the brown-haired, neanderthalic joker that had decided to share his two rusty pennies with the class...and, god, he’d better watch his food from now on. Blake looked like the type to carry powdered glass in her purse. “You’ll be staying after class so that we can talk about your behavior!”  
  
Cardin rolled his eyes but held his tongue with the careless aplomb that came with utter shitheads and people with a bad case of Dunning-Kruger going on… I preferred to think it was both. He looked like both.  
  
Moron. That was the word. He looked like a moron...and, no, I wasn’t judging him entirely on the basis that was him stopping my sister mid-sentence just to add his own shitty brand of racial commentary. Neither was I judging him on what I could remember of him, nothing good. Why do you ask?  
  
Ruby had stopped spinning her pen, her body now unnaturally still and stiff; she took in Cardin’s features for a second, then looked away without a sound while Ruby’s team gave him _the eye_ … I wondered if he knew how many enemies he’d just made today. Combat class was going to be _fun._ “Professor-”  
  
“Doctor,” he corrected with an expansive gesture, his coffee somehow staying in his cup as he did so. “Continue, Miss Rose.”  
  
“The general decided to attack the Faunus forces in the middle of the night, lights off, in the hopes that they’d be asleep.” Ruby’s voice was clipped, her cadence quick and nearly robotic in that way it did when she wanted to get something over with _right_ _now_. “He was a political appointee in no way ready to face the realities of his duties. The knowledge that upwards of seventy percent of Faunus possess night vision just shy of turning complete darkness into broad daylight escaped him and his advisors. Him and his army were captured nearly to a man during that engagement and it's still remembered as one of the greatest military disasters ever recorded, even seventy years later.”  
  
You could _hear_ Cardin gritting his teeth from where I was sitting and he was on the other side of the room from me. That sounded like something _personal~._  
  
… At a guess, I’d have to say that Grandpappy Winchester didn’t come out of that one smelling like roses. That wasn’t an uncommon story. Neither was people like Cardin carrying grudges from people long dead or soon to be so.  
  
I get it, man. Life is hard and nothing is going your way. Shit happened before you were even born and that’s why you’ll never have your very own house faunus like you deserve.  
  
Grow the fuck up.  
  
“It was such a failure, in fact, Atlas still uses his name to refer to officers that couldn’t find their own butt with a map and-”  
  
“Thank you, Miss Rose. For that, and for the colorful commentary.” Oobleck interrupted again, the amusement in his voice more than clear when there was a new round of laughter and Ruby’s blush returned with a vengeance. “That was near exactly what happened. General Lagune and his advisors allowed their ignorance, a good part of it wilful as was common at the time, to dictate their actions and the actions of their troops. This led to his defeat and the beginning of the end of the Faunus Wars.”  
  
Yeah. ‘Wilful ignorance’. Right. They were racist idiots, in other words, and I only _wished_ that it was less common than it was then. There’d be a lot fewer problems in the world if that was the case… Gods, why did Salem even bother again?  
  
That I had to keep asking myself that was worrying.  
  
His expression fell then, amusement gone as he took a sip of his coffee. “And the start of the modern era. The start of a new round of troubles between humans and faunus.” He shook his head, doing it so quickly it could have been mistaken for a pair of twitches. “How painful it is, seeing the mistakes of the past repeated again and again over shortsighted greed.”  
  
Weiss sat up straighter in her seat while Blake looked unbearably smug. That was going to be _awkward_ to deal with, as usual.  
  
“I’d enjoy continuing this line of thought with you all...” He sighed and checked his watch with a shrug. “But it seems that we have run out of time. Class is dismissed.” He turned towards the resident douchebag. “You’ll be staying here for a while longer, Mister Winchester.”  
  
With that, and a nudge to Jaune’s side to wake him up from his exhaustion coma, we packed up as a very messy unit. Team Yang Bang, that is. Even with the problems that we had with each other, of which there were many, we were a solid front. We’d watched movies together. Shared popcorn with each other. Ate enough candy to give us the shakes and conked out on the carpet together, only to wake up in compromising positions while in the middle of having pictures taken.  
  
Team Yang Bang had been through hell as one; Shared traumatic experiences pulled you together like nothing else. And blackmail. That too.  
  
I was so proud of them all.  
  
“I call dibs on his legs.” I chimed in, one of Jaune’s arms slung over my shoulder as we went to lunch. Who I was talking about needed no explanation...and, yeah. I might just have to let Jaune sleep in tomorrow. Not being able to walk without help was pretty bad. “If Ruby doesn’t get him first.”  
  
Or Nora. That girl had an obsession with legs, I swear… The breaking of them to be clear. She had her priorities in order.  
  
Blake’s hand grazed the section of her tartan skirt where Gambol Shroud normally hung without hesitation, her bow twitching in a non-existent wind. “I’ll take his arms then.”  
  
Such restraint, Blake.  
  
“He is - unpleasant.” Weiss kept her head pointed forward with a moue of distaste, her speech slow. “I have no quarrel with him but if we are talking about this... I suppose I shall take the rest if the occasion and reason to do so ever comes up…” She then amended what she’d said with an almost whisper, almost as an afterthought. “As long as it is within the rules of the school.”  
  
“Of course,” I agreed happily. “All within the rules. All above board and open for everyone to see…” And laugh at was implied.  
  
Jaune snored lightly in my ear, a sound that was as good as a full endorsement for our current course of action in my book. Good job, Boss. Never give an order that wouldn’t be followed. Good thinking. I knew you had it in you.  
  
Weiss hummed, taking Jaune’s silence the same way I had. “Of course.”  
  
We all knew the score here, even if it wasn’t said. Half of us heavily disliked the guy and now we were working with the better part of tribalism, harassing the hostile outsider until he fucked right off or died. That team RRVN, our sister team, had beef with him as well just made it even worse. We were a bloc and Winchester had just shit the bed.  
  
Was this many people against one man overkill? Was this much talent and skill being pointed in one direction a waste? Maybe.  
  
 **He should have kept his mouth shut.**


	12. Chapter 12

Legs kicking aimlessly in the air, feet beating against the stone at her heels and a tuneless ditty on her lips, Nora was happy...because of course she was. Why wouldn’t she be happy? Why wouldn’t she be sitting here in the quad, in the sun with her team while they talked about breaking a bully’s legs into itty bitty pieces in a way they wouldn’t get in trouble for?  
  
That was the important part, not getting in trouble. Not for her though...well, maybe just a little. Getting yelled at and getting detention sucked. It was what it would do to Ren that pulled her back from doing something that Cardin would regret. If she got in trouble, he got in trouble. That was how it worked and that made getting arrested for ‘excessive force’ kind of a big no-no.  
  
Ren would get all disappointed and mopey and she wouldn’t get kisses or pancakes for, like, an entire _week._ That couldn’t happen. It just couldn’t.  
  
 _Momma needed her sugar, darn it._ Living for the moment was great and all, but she had to have _some_ goals. Some lines she just didn’t, wouldn’t cross for anything.  
  
“Okay, so, guys. Team. We can’t let Yang get ahead of us on this, okay? For real. That’s super important. It can’t happen.” Ruby scratched her cheek with the eraser of her pencil, eyes slightly narrowed at the notebook of nefarious PLANS in her lap; the word PLANS scrawled across the front in choppy lines of ink. From putting a bucket of water over a door to stink bombs in their lockers, it was all there; Nora approved. “This is my problem and dad doesn’t need to have to bail Yang out of lockup.”  
  
Nora nodded. That sounded like something Yang would do. She didn’t have a Ren to keep her on the straight and narrow after all.  
  
Pyrrha took a heavy bite out of an apple and reached for the picnic napkins…it looked like she needed it too. Beacon had good food. When the juice was running down your chin, that was when you knew _quality._ “Is that something that comes up often?”  
  
“... Not really. Nothing longer than an hour,” Ruby grumbled as she wrote something in between the lines. “She’s got a lot of money. Investments and junk.”  
  
Nora gasped. Police lockup, lots of money, investments? This mystery hole went even deeper than Nora could have ever believed; Yang was pretty cool. Was it possible that she was even _cooler_? “Is your sister a mob boss?”  
  
“Wha-” Ruby stopped and thought that over longer than she really should have. “No. No, I’m pretty sure she isn’t a mob boss. I know where she gets most of her money from, and it isn’t crime.”  
  
“Pretty sure isn’t entirely sure though,” Nora pointed out. “Also, you just said most. Where does the rest come from?”   
  
These were the questions that had to be asked. The people needed to know. The people needed to be informed of the menace in their midst before it was too late!  
  
… Not really though. Yang was pretty cool. Really cool. Best friend material for sure, if not for Renny having taken up that slot for life already. This was fun though, so...whoo!  
  
Ruby sighed the sigh of someone that knew they were cornered but didn’t want to admit it. Ren did those sometimes so Nora knew them on hearing, just like everything else about Ren… Ren, who was currently shaking his head at her. Too much? “She isn’t a mob boss.”  
  
“Alright then. Yang isn’t a mob boss. No one was saying she was.” Pyrrha reassured their leader, her smile not quite reaching her eyes as she did so. No doubt she’d just filed that little thought away for later, much like Nora had… Where had she put the magnifying glass again? “Moving on, what’s the plan so far?”  
  
“Nothing concrete yet but I’ve got, like, twenty pounds of paint bombs back in our room. That’s a start. Mix in a pinch of Lightning dust and their room would be a permanent tie-dye.” She shrugged as the excitement that only came with a good explosion rose up in Nora’s chest. “We can’t do that though.”  
  
Nora, greatly disappointed, then had to ask, “Why not?”  
  
“It isn’t their room. The school is just renting it out.”  
  
“Oh. Right.” Nora pouted. “That sucks.”  
  
“Also I’m pretty sure that paint bombing someone is super illegal. Or something.” Ruby put her notebook to the side and reached for the cheese slices. Ren had outdone himself, as usual. “I’m not a lawyer or anything, but having Dad bail me out instead of him saving Yang isn’t exactly better.”  
  
“Boooo.”  
  
“I’d like to say that we could just attack him socially but, uh…” Ruby ignored her to start gathering together the pieces of what already looked like a pretty good sandwich. “Okay. Cards on the table. That isn’t us. I don’t think it's his either. It would be like watching kids slap fight.”  
  
Nora gasped, offended. That was all the input that was needed here...and Renny was _totally_ good at social stuff! Rude!  
  
“I don’t think that’s quite fair…” Pyrrha slowly trailed off at Ruby’s blank look, the much smaller girl’s mustard spreading motions along her meal surprisingly intimidating. “... I could be better at social warfare, I suppose...”  
  
The meanest part of the girl’s body was at the very end of her well-trimmed pinkie toe...and that was just because the little bastard kept getting stubbed against door jambs and sneaky table legs. Being a mean girl, or pretending to be one, was just never going to happen. Nora liked to think the best of people, but even she had to face reality every once in a while.  
  
“It would be like ruining the reputation of an Ursa. No one likes him. No one respects him.” Ren calmly added his two cents over a heating pad and a kettle, one that he’d been eyeing for the last fifteen minutes with no sign of stopping. She loved him, yes, but she’d _never_ understood his fascination with herbal tea. It was like drinking _salad._ “Our time would be better spent on something more - substantial.”  
  
Like breaking his legs. This is the part where they decided to break his legs, right?  
  
“It took him less than two weeks for him to flush his reputation down the toilet. That would be almost impressive if it wasn’t so sad.” Pyrrha coughed into a fist and smoothed out a non-existent wrinkle in her skirt. “It isn’t just Team Yangb-” She visibly stopped herself from finishing that, a dash of red rising to her cheeks as she did so. A dash of red that turned into a splotchy mess when Nora began to cackle. “It isn’t just Team _Juneberry_ that we’re racing against.”  
  
Yangbang was just the _best_ name. The balls on that girl.  
  
Ruby frowned. “Who else?”  
  
“You know that one girl? That Faunus at lunchtime, the one who had their ears pulled?” Pyrrha nodded as Ruby’s mouth opened into an ‘o’ of realization. “She was part of team CFVY.”  
  
“Okay.”  
  
“They’re a second-year team,” Pyrrha continued, “and already considered to be the best in it...and the most popular. CRDL, or just Cardin at least, aren’t going to be having an easy time of it from now on.”  
  
“So…” Ruby’s brows furrowed. “You’re saying we’re just piling onto the heap at this point.”  
  
Pyrrha was apologetic when she replied, “there’s a queue.”  
  
Right around the block.  
  
“Darn it,” Ruby cursed before she started fumbling with her sandwich and the notebook. “Now we’re racing against the clock. Forget how Yang is going to see about dismantling him during combat class. Cardin might not even last out the week before seeing the inside of the infirmary.”  
  
“Now that’s just quitter talk,” Nora chirped, “not the Cardin and the hospital bit because, uh, _duh_ , that’s gonna happen without us or not; but we can _totally_ pull something off before he ends up there.”  
  
Not being able to break something important, like his legs, really limited their options...but that was what made revenge _fun_.  
  
“We could - ambush him! Yeah! Surprise him!” Nora nodded as the pieces started to fall into place in her head. “Catch him with his pants down and where he feels safe! His bed.” She hopped off her seat on the wall to begin pacing in thought, hand at her chin. “Do you guys know what a blanket party is?”  
  
She had a couple dozen batteries lying around somewhere and more than a couple of old socks. They already had everything they needed, really.  
  
“That’s against the rules, Nora.” Ren shot her idea down instantly, as was his prerogative. “That’s even worse than the paint bombs.”  
  
“He won’t even have bruises after!” Nora offered. “Promise!”  
  
“No.”  
  
Nora growled, shook her fist, then went back to thinking. The Ren had spoken. “There’s, uh...garter snakes up here, I think. We could…” She shook her head quickly. “No. No. Bad Nora. That’s animal cruelty.”  
  
“It is,” Ren didn’t deny. She didn’t even have to say what she was thinking. He already knew. “Nothing involving live animals or gang beatings, please.”  
  
Nora stopped in place at that, her mouth falling open in a silent gasp as her eyes popped open wide. The thought that had just come over her had hit like the lightning bolt that had unlocked her Semblance. Hard, fast, and it made her hair feel all frizzy and toes all tingly. “I got it.”  
  
Ruby, pen held to paper, gave her some lead with a questioning, “you do?”  
  
“Yep!”  
  
“Why are we doing this? I have to ask. I mean, he was _rude_ , but…” Pyrrha shifted uncomfortably. “Aren’t we sort of - overreacting?”  
  
That was crazy talk. Totally nutzo. What kind of question was that? This was a _combat school_. Where they learned how to deal with problems through _combat_. What they were doing was pretty tame in comparison, if you thought about.  
  
...Nora couldn’t help but be disappointed in her.  
  
“Maybe, yeah,” Ruby’s casual reply seemed to stun Pyrrha, making her blink like someone that had just taken a blow to the chin and saw the lights flicker. “But he’s a jerk.” Ruby squared her jaw. “He’s a tool and a dummy and, like, you just said there is a _queue_ of people that want to kick his butt. There’s a _reason_ why.”  
  
“He’ll never learn to keep his hands and views to himself without negative reinforcement. His actions, his bullying, and all-around unpleasantness shall continue until he realizes that it's better to keep himself _to_ himself before he breaks all his ties.” Ren, eternally zen, took in a breath of the steam coming off of his cup. “Don’t think of what we’re doing as revenge. Think of it as...peers correcting a fellow student that has lost their way.” Ren rotated the cup in his hands thoughtfully. “If he continues as he is, he will have no one at his back when the time comes.”  
  
Pyrrha, for some reason, then looked to Nora while biting her lip.  
  
Nora shrugged. “I don’t like bullies. He’s just lucky I’m not giving him the hammer.”  
  
Short. Simple. All that needed to be said; not what Pyrrha had been looking for at all (Nora was manic, not stupid), but she accepted it with a sigh. “Alright.”  
  
Ruby rose a brow. “Alright?”  
  
Pyrrha nodded. “Alright.”  
  
Nora flopped down into the grass and began rummaging through the basket for something to nibble on. Something with jam. And banana slices. “Alright!”  
  
Ren, with a roll of his eyes when Nora gave him a look so pointed you could have used it to puncture a balloon, joined in with his own ‘alright’ and a quiet sip of his tea.  
  
Nora let it go. He was so _shy._..damn him for being so cute about it.  
  
“So, what was your idea again, Nora?”  
  
“Well, when Ren said ‘no live animals’...it came to me.”  
  
It was a good plan. A great plan. A _Valkyrie_ plan.  
  
CRDL wouldn’t even know what hit them.  
  
==========  
  
I sucked in a deep breath. Deep. DEEP. The deepest of breaths filled my lungs, expanded my chest; made people trip over their own feet and run into walls as my whole new uniform found itself under the same pressure as my old… Gods, I felt good.  
  
“What are you _doing_ , Xiao-Long? Just...” Weiss’, her eyes locked onto my chest as she put a defensive arm across her own, knew _exactly_ what I was doing. Establishing dominance. Sounding the battle cry. Flaring out the plumage and making sure that everyone knew where they stood. _Beneath me._ “Have you ever heard of shame even once in your life? A sense of propriety?”  
  
“In a dictionary maybe. It's never been something I’ve needed in my day-to-day.” A carefree look in her direction was met with a self-conscious scowl. “Propriety is for _nerds_.”  
  
Weiss, instead of responding to that accusation with her usual vitriol, let out a soft gasp as her eyes went wide. “Excuse _me_?”  
  
“Also,” I pushed back her upset before it could really take hold, filing that away as something that Weiss might have actually been hurt by...for some reason. Why that was, who knew? Childhood trauma was fucked up like that. “I was inhaling the smell of nascent victory. A triumph unborn, the smell of blood and offal and smelly organ bits soaking into an arena’s sand.” I took another breath for emphasis and to distract. “It is a good pain.”  
  
Today was the day we had combat class. Our second ever combat class. Our first chance at unleashing an ass-whupping upon CRDL that they would never forget...maybe.  
  
I hadn’t thought about it at the time, but Yangbang was just slightly more functional than my Uncle’s love life.  
  
That wasn’t anything to worry about right now. Not really. I had zero worries that we were going to lose against CRDL if they accepted our challenge which, seeing as they were a pack of ‘Alpha’ morons, I had no doubt they’d take us up on; The difference in quality between our two teams was just that deep.  
  
Yes, even with Jaune. Think about that for a second. It would take Jaune a semester, at most, to start kicking in Cardin’s shit with any regularity. It would take the guy that had never picked up a sword before an entire semester to start wiping the floor with what I assumed was a graduate from a preparatory Hunting school. That was just _sad_...but, well, he was sad. A real loser.  
  
I’d seen the guy fight once. All of once. He was - kind of a joke. His whole team was. Collectively. But he was, in fact, a joke all his own. All strength, no skill. Not an original thought in his head other than swing, swing, and swing until he hit something.  
  
They didn’t even seem to realize how shit they were either. That was evidence all its own, the sort of unfaltering confidence in their own nonexistent accomplishments that only came with idiots and children and idiots that happened to be children.  
  
Trust fund children. Ugh.  
  
When Weiss, the very definition of combat support was able to beat any two of you (that was just a very good estimate) in a two-on-one…? You had problems.  
  
… Anyway, ignoring them for a second, my team’s cohesion could have been better. I could admit it. I was many things, but out of touch with reality wasn’t one of them. It had only been a little short of two weeks so it wasn’t _that bad_ once you thought about it...as long as we didn’t let it fester, of course.  
  
Work, work, and more work; a hard worker’s only reward.  
  
Jaune made a sleepy little whistling noise out from between his teeth as his head nodded in otherwise silent agreement. A good guy was Jaune. Always so invested in the wellbeing of the team and its inner workings, all the little metaphorical gears and imaginary glue with paper clips that kept us together as people.  
  
Note to self. Get the rest of the team to join in on the morning exercise. Step one to a cohesive unit was a common enemy, after all~.  
  
Neo was rubbing off on me...or to me. Or both. Or the other way around. Oof.  
  
Someone needed to take a load off again. Guess who?  
  
“Victory smells like fish that someone forgot to put in the freezer.” Blake interrupted my train of thought with a nasal whine, her nose held between thumb and forefinger as her bow tried its damndest to melt into her skull. “It smells like someone set a dumpster on fire. How can you stand it?”  
  
Badly.  
  
“Easily,” I drawled. At that moment, we walked into the classroom and I waved at the source of the stench Blake was talking about. At the focus of a several day-long campaign to make it so that everyone that had a grievance against CRDL knew of each other. Knew of each other and got _ideas_ and the _bravery_ to put them into practice.   
  
We hadn’t even personally done anything yet, didn’t even _know_ what had already happened, but CRDL already wasn’t looking so good. Unkempt. Twitchy. Surrounded by a ring of empty seats and with no one within twenty feet of them that wasn’t gagging and trying to breathe through their shirts. Everything was as it should be. **_Snap._** “It isn’t actually on fire yet.”  
  
It would be though. It would be...and those guys had no way out.  
  
Glynda’s attempts at getting CRDL to shower and change had been met with - resistance. Not from the boys. Gods no. Smelling like a quartet of roadkill skunks in the summer wasn’t something they wanted to do but, well… Not all Semblances were flashy. Not all skills were loud.  
  
Keeping them from a set of clean clothes and a hot shower was child's play. Not that I would know. Provably.  
  
No idea what that _smell_ was, though.  
  
Glynda, at a point, seemed to have come to a decision; wait and see being it. College-level combat schools were like that, I suppose. If they couldn’t handle the pressure or the situation by themselves…  
  
Jaune, who was so exhausted from the training sessions that he’d ignored CRDL entirely and immediately fallen asleep at his desk, made a loud snerking sound and went from sleeping to fully awake with no time in between; our fellow students didn’t even glance at him, already used to it. “Not the firecrackers!”  
  
“Yes. Yes, the firecrackers. Because, after all,” I raised a finger in a lecturing manner while stroking an imaginary wise man's beard. “The material for raising fire should always be kept in readiness.”  
  
Blake coughed, her eyes watery and bemused. “... You read the ‘Art of War’ series?”  
  
“Something like that.” A handkerchief appeared in Blake’s hand as if by magic, courtesy of myself, while I kicked a leg over my knee...and, wow. I had no idea that anyone had even read that, especially people that I knew by name. Saying that that series wasn’t exactly one of my best sellers was being kind. “You’ve got a little something there.”  
  
Yeah, it was _famous_ back where I’m from but it’s not exactly a page-turner, even with the changes I made.  
  
Blake stuffed that handkerchief into her face with a mumbled _something_ that might have been a thank you. Her shoulders falling in relief as her bow rose to the halfway mark was as good as in my eyes; Perfumed stuff was good and all, but I preferred scent neutralizers instead. They didn’t mix with stuff they shouldn’t.  
  
Blake didn’t mind my choices, clearly. If she breathed any harder that handkerchief would be in her lungs.  
  
Weiss, seeing Blake reach salvation in the depths of a five-by-five inch square of yellow silk, began hastily patting around her combat skirt.“Oh, dear Gods… Why didn’t I think of that? I should have done that earlier.”  
  
She really should have. And why does it not surprise me that Weiss carries a lacey handkerchief in her skirt? It’s even embroidered. _Initialed_. Such decadence.  
  
“Probably. I get it though.” I flare my Semblance slightly, a thin pair of smoke lines from the nostrils the only evidence of me literally burning the smell of raw sewage out of my nose. “That kind of smell deadens the nerves. Hampers the thinking process.”  
  
“Oh. Oh…” Jaune looked around, finally waking up for real as his face turned an alarming shade of green. “What is that _smell_?”  
  
“See?”  
  
“Now that everyone is here, the class may finally begin.” Professor Goodwitch said, her crop beating against the palm of her hand as the room went silent like she’d hit a switch; That the airflow around her wasn’t _quite_ right, a bit of dust swirling around her and away a very subtle tell, was only to be expected. Keeping her normally stern features up would have been pretty hard otherwise. “Last week we were able to establish your baseline. What you were capable of and what you are not.”  
  
I gently patted Jaune on the shoulder in solidarity. Nothing needed to be said. Not now. We all knew what was up.  
  
“Starting off today’s match will be Team CRDL,” The good professor said in a clear attempt to get them as far away from her as possible...and, as her eyes did a meaningful flicker, towards the people that had caused this mess in the first place. Guess who that was? “And team JWBR.”  
  
“Oh no! Did you hear that, Yangbang? We have to fight the trash brigade!” I gasped and shook my head as the smoke in my nose temporarily became an actual flame. “Say it isn’t so!”  
  
No. Really. I wasn’t entirely kidding here. I’d wanted to kick their asses before, but now that I’d had some time to think about it and I’d gotten closer to them... I...I was going to have to _touch_ these people. With my _fists._  
  
Oh, gods, it was getting _worse_ as we got closer. What have I _done_!?  
  
“Save your theatrics for the theater, Miss Xiao-Long.” Glynda shut me down instantly with a wave of her crop, her cape fluttering menacingly as she made it clear that was in no mood for my shenanigans. “You are here to spar. Now, spar.”  
  
I sucked in my lips like I’d just bit into a lemon and pulled back, utterly (Ha!) cowed. I knew how to pick my battles. This wasn’t one. I was just gonna have to suck it up. “Yes, ma’am.”  
  
“May the Gods strike me down,” Blake wept in sort of agreement as she wrapped my handkerchief around her face as a makeshift bandana… Faunus senses weren’t all they were cracked up to be, I guess. “It's like someone threw up in a _diaper_.”  
  
“Like a freshly opened septic tank at a Vacuan food place on a taco Tuesday,” Jaune choked from behind his sleeve.  
  
“It's like someone dug up a fresh grave, kicked open the casket, and decided to roll around in what they found before walking into a church.” Weiss gagged. Moistly. “Oh, I almost…”  
  
“We know, Weiss. We know.”  
  
As we crawled up into the ring like a group of criminals that had been forced to walk all the way to the gallows, Cardin’s bloodshot eyes somehow became even more bloodshot, a map of near bursting veins; He looked deranged. His hair was a straggly, greasy mess. His fingers were pale and bloodless around the shaft of his mace and he hadn’t blinked once since we’d come up here.  
  
… His team was there too, I guess. Was it bad that I couldn’t remember their names? Because I couldn’t remember their names.  
  
We’ll pretend that that was on purpose and move on.  
  
“Make it quick, guys,” I hissed through my lips, afraid to open my mouth in the event that these idiots were somehow flammable...or that I might be able to taste the air. “Blitz em’ and then we can go back to our room and a nice, hot shower.”  
  
Cardin’s nostrils flared like a bull's as a vein on his forehead, already throbbing, bulged alarmingly.  
  
I couldn’t resist. It was terrible of me, I know, but I couldn’t resist.  
  
“This should be quick.”  
  
 **I wouldn’t have been me if I had.**  
  
===========  
  
"We won,” I sorta said, sorta groaned against the opaque glass of my room in full lockdown; the insides a toast eight-hundred degrees and climbing, sterilizing every inch of me and my equipment in cleansing flame...but not cleansing enough. “We won...but at what cost?”  
  
Maybe, just maybe, gathering together a group of like-minded people with resources and a grudge hadn’t been my best idea ever.  
  
The fight, if you could even call CRDL running at us like rabid animals a fight, had been over in less than a minute. A single long, disgusting minute; the stench of what I finally realized was heated fox urine mixing with the fine perfume of rotting fish heads with compost and a slight tang of barely legal hallucinogens seeping from their skin.  
  
Getting into close quarters with them had had...consequences. Some good, some bad. Mostly bad, but at least we’d had an excuse as to why we weren’t the crack team to end all crack teams.  
  
A seventeen-year-old trying to tear into their sparring partner’s leg with their teeth while foaming at the mouth, directly after having their weapon thrown out of the ring, gave us a breather from that kind of judgment. Miss Goodwitch had been very understanding, once all was said and done… Cold comfort, but it was something.  
  
Weiss had vanished into the bathroom as soon as the fight had ended. That had been three hours ago. Three hours and counting, with no sign of her returning to the public anytime soon; ice cream was, as always, waiting if she needed it.  
  
Jaune, the one that had spent the least amount of time in contact with the walking plague vectors had just sort of - curled up - and cracked open a comic book after washing his face. Lucky bastard… I bet he was laughing at us right now. Being super inoffensive had been a working strat. Crazy.  
  
Blake had vanished before we’d even got back to our room. She was just completely gone and there was a non-zero chance that she’d crawled under a bush out in the quad to die.  
  
“Maybe I should pull back some?” I thumped my head against the glass, adding another two hundred degrees. “Maybe I should think things through?” I thumped my head against it again. “Maybe?”  
  
… Nah.  
  
 **Why mess with success?**  
  
==========  
  
“But…” Ruby whispered as a light throbbing started behind her temples. “We haven’t even done anything yet.”  
  
They were going to have to step up their game now. Darn it.  
  
She blamed Yang.


End file.
